Other books by this author

The Black Death

The Knights Templar

Alchemy & Alchemists

The Cathars

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 2

Andrei Tarkovsky

Sean Martin

www.pocketessentials.com

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 3

This edition published in 2005 by Pocket Essentials

P.O.Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ

Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing, P.O. Box 257, Howe Hill Road,

North Pomfret,Vermont 05053

http://www.pocketessentials.com

The right of Sean Martin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable

to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.The book is sold subject to the

condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or

otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or binding cover

other than in which it is published, and without similar conditions, including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent publication.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 904048 49 8

EAN 978 1 904048 49 7

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berks

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 4

My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly,
I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys of which
had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always
wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.

I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I

had always wanted to say without knowing how.

Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new

language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection,
life as a dream.

Ingmar Bergman

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 5

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 6

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden;
Trond S Trondsen and Jan Bielawski of nostalghia.com; Nick
Harding; Olegar Fedoro; Marina Tarkovskaya; André
Bennett;Victoria Carolan; Layla Alexander-Garrett; my sister
Lois and, for answering my Tarkovsky-related questions of
yesteryear, Mark Le Fanu.

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 7

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 8

Contents

Introduction

Life and Times

Theory and Practice

The Student Films

Ivan’s Childhood

Andrei Rublev

Solaris

Mirror

120

Stalker

145

Nostalgia

163

10:

The Sacrifice

179

11:

Works in Other Media

197

Endnotes

215

Appendix I: Complete Filmography

232

Appendix II: Unrealised Scripts and Projects

236

Suggestions for Further Reading

242

Index

249

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 9

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 10

Introduction

This book is intended to serve as a short overview of
Tarkovsky’s work for those unfamiliar with it, or as a stim-
ulus to go back and rewatch the films for those already
acquainted with them.

My aim has been to discuss all aspects of Tarkovsky’s work,

from his full-length films to the lesser-known works for tele-
vision, radio and stage. Tarkovsky saw himself primarily as a
poet and it is a poetic sensibility that pervades all his work,
regardless of medium. There are problems, however, in
attempting to write about Tarkovsky at all. As Natasha
Synessios wrote, ‘Most of us still visit the cinema for enter-
tainment, or escapism, not for spiritual sustenance, for reve-
lations and benedictions. Yet those of us who are
“Tarkovsky-marked” experience his films in just such reli-
gious terms. Analysis is not usually conducive to this type of
experience, yet through it one hopes to unravel something
of the mysterious and ineffable process of creation.’

approach has therefore been only partially concerned with
analysis, as I feel that the inherent mystery of Tarkovsky’s
films speaks for itself, and the films are, ultimately, not solv-
able.They are films that change as we do.

Tarkovsky’s films could be seen to move through three

phases, concentrating successively on History, the Family and
a final, more philosophical phase, which I have labelled the

1 1

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 11

Triptych. Obviously, these distinctions are somewhat arbi-
trary: The Sacrifice, for instance – the third part of the
Triptych – could also be seen as a portrait of a dysfunctional
family, while Mirror is as much about history as it is the
family. Others may be inclined to feel that Tarkovsky’s work
falls neatly into two sections, with Mirror marking the end of
the first period, or still others may feel that his work is one
homogenous whole.

In giving a production history and brief discussion of each

film – intended more to provoke reflection rather than to try
to explain what the films mean – I have also added sections
on the autobiographical elements of each. Tarkovsky’s life
and work are inextricably entwined. As Peter Green
observed, the subjects of his films – childhood, war, a
yearning for belief, the complexities of family life, nostalgia
for home, exile and death – are also ‘stations in his own life.
There is a rare congruence between subject and object that
goes beyond the usual autobiographical parallels artists draw
in their work.’

Of course, no book, including this one, can replace seeing

the actual films, preferably on the big screen, and it is my
hope that, if this book inspires the reader to go back to
Tarkovsky’s films and to watch them with both an open and
an active mind, then it will have served its purpose. Natasha
Synessios’s words about Mirror are valid for the whole of
Tarkovsky’s work: ‘when all is said and done, this film works
on the heart and soul, not the mind; it is with them, first and
foremost, that we must approach it.’

S E A N M A RT I N

1 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 12

Life and Times

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–86) was a part of the generation of
Soviet filmmakers that emerged during the Khrushchev
Thaw years, which also saw the emergence of such directors
as Otar Iosseliani, Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Mikhalkov-
Konchalovsky. Tarkovsky made only seven full-length films,
yet this slender oeuvre has established him as the most
important and well-known Russian director since
Eisenstein. Although Tarkovsky’s reputation continues to
grow, especially in North America, where initial critical reac-
tion was decidedly cooler than in Europe,

his genius was

recognised within his own lifetime by Jean-Paul Sartre, who
championed Tarkovsky’s first feature, Ivan’s Childhood, and
Ingmar Bergman, who regarded Tarkovsky as ‘the greatest of
them all’.

Tarkovsky’s work has been admired by directors as

diverse as Bergman, Victor Erice, Terry Gilliam, Peter
Greenaway, Krzysztof Kies´lowski and Lars von Trier. In its
Ten Best Films of All Time poll in 1982, Sight and Sound
critics voted Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev, as
runner-up, a remarkable achievement since the film had only
been released in the UK in 1973, making it the youngest film
on the list by far.

Tarkovsky’s films are slow, dreamlike searches for faith and

redemption, and it comes as no surprise to learn that, during
his years in the Soviet Union, he was often criticised for

1 3

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 13

‘mysticism’ and his continued failure to tackle subjects in a
style more acceptable to socialist realism. And yet Tarkovsky
and his films were very much a product of the Soviet system,
which ironically allowed directors a great deal of freedom to
express themselves. Before we move on to examine
Tarkovsky’s films, writings and works in other media, it is
instructive to explore briefly the Soviet film industry as it
was when Tarkovsky was working within it and Tarkovsky’s
own biography, as both played an important part in making
Tarkovsky’s films what they are.

Tarkovsky’s Early Years

Andrei Arsenevich Tarkovsky was born on 4 April 1932 in
the village of Zavrazhie, which lies just outside the town of
Yurievets on the banks of the Volga in the Ivanovo region
about 60 miles north of Moscow. The family were literary:
his paternal grandfather, Alexander (1860–1920), was a poet
who had been a member of the People’s Freedom Move-
ment, which espoused culture and learning for all; as a result,
he was banished by the Tsar for his liberal views.Tarkovsky’s
father was the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, who was born in the
Ukrainian city of Kirovograd (then Elizavetgrad) in 1907. He
attended the Moscow Literary Institute during the late
1920s, where he met Maria Ivanovna Vishnakova. They
subsequently married and had two children, Andrei and his
sister, Marina (born 1934). Tarkovsky senior had yet to be
published and so, to support the family, worked away from
home as a translator.The family moved to Moscow in 1935,
where Tarkovsky’s mother took a job as a proofreader at the
First State Printing House. Tarkovsky’s father left the family
in 1937 to live with another woman, although he continued
to support his family financially and to visit on birthdays and

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 14

other important occasions. Tarkovsky began his schooling in
Moscow in 1939, but with the Nazi invasion of Russia two
years later, was evacuated with his mother and sister back to
Yurievets, where they remained for two years. Although the
family were confirmed Muscovites, Tarkovsky’s early life in
the country, both before the family moved to Moscow and
during his time as an evacuee, would leave an indelible
impression on him which he would later portray in Mirror.

Tarkovsky claimed that his mother groomed him from

childhood to be an artist, making sure that he was exposed
to art and literature from an early age (though given both
Arseny’s and Maria Ivanovna’s literary predilections, it would
have been difficult for the young Tarkovsky to have avoided
books and works of art). To further this end, Tarkovsky
studied music for seven years, as well as having three years of
art lessons at the 1905 Academy.

Tarkovsky seems to have resented his mother’s attempts to

foster in him a sense that he was an artist-in-waiting, and, as
a result, rebelled by hanging out with kids his mother didn’t
approve of, playing football and acting tough. However,
despite his rebelliousness, he did love books, and was appar-
ently only quiet when reading.

At school, he was an average

pupil, a ‘dreamer more than thinker’.

It was perhaps his lack

of academic aptitude that made Tarkovsky realise that he
might indeed become an artist one day, perhaps as a
composer, painter or writer. Although as a boy and teenager,
the young Tarkovsky ‘caused his mother a lot of worry’

–

in addition to his difficult behaviour, he also suffered from
tuberculosis – he was always to write in later life of his high
regard for her, although this would seem to be, in part, a
retrospective judgment.

His relationship with his father was likewise complex.

Tarkovsky detested Antonina, his father’s second wife, and

1 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 15

can have only felt something like relief when she died unex-
pectedly in 1940.Arseny joined the Red Army as a war jour-
nalist and was sent to the Front, where he lost a leg.
Tarkovsky’s memories of the war revolved around waiting
for it to end and for his father to come home.When Arseny
did return home, as a decorated war hero (he received the
Order of the Red Star), he did not rejoin his first family;
indeed, he did not even go to meet the young Andrei when
he and his sister returned to Moscow from their time as
evacuees in Yurievets. But despite this apparent callousness,
Tarkovsky held his father in high regard and, as a teenager,
seems to have been closer to his father than his mother,
spending what time he could with him, discussing books,
listening to Arseny read his own poetry and sampling his
father’s extensive record collection (Bach was to become a
favourite).The teenage Tarkovsky seems to have regarded his
mother as the more guilty party with regard to the break-up
of the marriage, which again may go some way to explain
why he would want to spend so much time with his father
at this stage of his life.

In 1951, Tarkovsky enrolled in the School of Oriental

Languages to study Arabic; he had been interested in the East
since an early age (perhaps as a result of hearing stories about
his family’s supposed origins among the Daghestani nobility
during the reign of Ivan the Terrible).

However, he did not

finish his course due to concussing himself in the gym one
day, and he found employment instead on a geological expe-
dition to Siberia, where he spent a year (1953–4) prospecting
the remote Turuchansk region for mineral deposits. That
Tarkovsky ended up on this expedition may not have been
entirely his own doing: his lack of aptitude for serious
academic study had been a continuing worry for the family,
and it seems that, after the incident in the gym, Tarkovsky’s

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 16

mother intervened and virtually exiled the would-be
director to the East, to prevent him wasting away among
Moscow’s stilyaga, the dandified Russian equivalent of the
Beat Generation.

Despite being summarily sent away, Tarkovsky thrived in

Siberia. He walked many hundreds of miles along the River
Kureika, where he spent a lot of time drawing and thinking.
It is not recorded how successful he was as an employee of
the expedition, but as he didn’t get fired, we can assume that
he passed muster. But the expedition did not ignite in him
the desire to be a geologist. Rather, alone with nature – and
himself – for the first lengthy period since his days as an
evacuee in Yurievets, he resolved to become a film director.
Maya Turovskaya notes that Tarkovsky’s ‘spiritual baggage was
acquired during his none-too-happy childhood and was
little affected by subsequent external influences’.

Likewise,

his year in the Siberian taiga would serve as a dramatic base-
line for nearly all his subsequent work. Nature is ever present
in his films – often celebrated, always mysterious – as is the
lone protagonist, struggling to come to terms with his own
life and the world around – and within – him.

Upon returning from Siberia, Tarkovsky applied for a

place at the prestigious All-Union State Institute of
Cinematography,VGIK.That year (1954), there were around
500 applicants for only 15 places.Tarkovsky was among those
chosen, and he began studies under the veteran director,
Mikhail Romm (1901–71). Romm appeared to be tempera-
mentally at the opposite end of the spectrum to Tarkovsky.
He was known chiefly for his films of the 1930s, such as
Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), both of
which firmly toed the Party line. Given that, and combined
with Tarkovsky’s less than inspiring academic record up to
that time, one could be forgiven for assuming that his time

1 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 17

at VGIK was not to be a success.Yet Romm was a brilliant
and unorthodox teacher, and unorthodoxy was precisely
what Tarkovsky needed. Romm believed that one could not
be taught to be a director, but had to learn to think for
oneself and develop an individual voice.

During his time at VGIK, Tarkovsky and his fellow

students studied all aspects of filmmaking, watching the clas-
sics of Soviet cinema and taking part in workshops in which
they would demonstrate their technical ability. This even
included acting: Tarkovsky’s fellow student and friend,
Alexander Gordon, remembers him giving a superb
performance as the aging Prince Bolkonsky when Romm
got the students to perform scenes from War and Peace
during their third year at VGIK.

Tarkovsky saw many clas-

sics from outside the Soviet Union, including Citizen Kane,
the films of John Ford and William Wyler, and the works of
the fathers of the French New Wave, Jean Renoir and Jean
Vigo. Tarkovsky developed a personal pantheon that
included Bergman, Bunuel, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Fellini
and Antonioni. The only Soviet director who made it into
his pantheon was Dovzhenko, although he was good friends
with the Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, whom he
regarded as ‘a genius in everything’. He also spoke highly of
Iosseliani and, on occasion, of Boris Barnet. But above them
all was the towering figure of Robert Bresson, whom
Tarkovsky regarded as the ultimate film artist.

Whilst at VGIK, Tarkovsky co-directed two shorts, The

Killers (1956) and There Will Be No Leave Today (1959), which
are discussed in the ‘Student Films’ chapter. He also saw
Hamlet on stage for the first time (the Paul Scofield produc-
tion). In 1957, he married fellow student, Irma Rausch, with
whom he had a son, Arseny (Senka), who was born in 1962.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 18

Tarkovsky’s Professional Career

Tarkovsky’s life and career after VGIK are perhaps better
known. A year after making There Will Be No Leave Today, he
completed his studies and made his award-winning diploma
film, The Steamroller and the Violin, which won first prize at
the New York Student Film Festival in 1961. It was an auspi-
cious time for new filmmakers to be emerging in the Soviet
Union.The Soviet film industry was undergoing something
of a renaissance; the resultant surge in production from the
mid-fifties on would bode well for Tarkovsky and his gener-
ation. Films such as The Cranes are Flying and The Ballad of a
Soldier caused an international sensation, and Tarkovsky
would become the new star in the firmament of this Soviet
New Wave.

Tarkovsky shot his first full-length film, Ivan’s Childhood,

in 1961. At the film’s first screening in Moscow in March
1962, Mikhail Romm famously declared ‘Remember the
name:Tarkovsky.’

They would prove to be prophetic words:

the film won the Golden Lion at Venice later that year and
was championed in the West by no less than Jean-Paul Sartre,
who praised it as ‘Socialist surrealism’.

Tarkovsky was

instantly recognised in the West as a major director; Ingmar
Bergman would later write that his discovery of Ivan’s
Childhood was ‘like a miracle’ and that ‘Tarkovsky is for me
the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to
the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a
dream.’

As Tarkovsky began work on what would become

his second feature, Andrei Rublev, his standing was at its high-
water mark in Moscow. He would never enjoy such a posi-
tion again in his homeland.

Andrei Rublev was to be the beginning of the end for

Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union. Although completed in

1 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 19

1966, it was not released until 1971 on the grounds that it
was too naturalistic, unpatriotic and, perhaps worst of all in
the eyes of the authorities, ‘mystical’. The film was first
screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969, where it was
awarded the FIPRESCI Prize. It was finally released in the
West in 1973.

By the time Andrei Rublev was released, Tarkovsky had

shot his third feature, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel,
Solaris. Although the film was part of the seemingly ‘safe’
genre of science fiction, the shoot was difficult, primarily due
to frequent arguments between Tarkovsky and his
cameraman, Vadim Yusov, who had shot all of Tarkovsky’s
films from The Steamroller and the Violin onwards. The two
men would not work together again, and Tarkovsky asked
Georgy Rerberg to shoot his next feature, the autobio-
graphical Mirror. Mirror is at the heart of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre
in every way, but was met with official condemnation for
being obscure and elitist. Such was the furore surrounding
the film, that Tarkovsky briefly considered giving up film-
making and also began to toy with the idea of making a film
in the West.

The last film Tarkovsky would make in the Soviet Union

was another venture into science fiction, Stalker. The film,
based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, marks a
turning point in Tarkovsky’s work, towards a more pared
down and minimalistic style. The film was completed in
1979 and was shown in Cannes to rapturous reviews in
1980. The Polish director Andrzej Wajda felt that, with
Stalker, Tarkovsky was ‘throwing down the gauntlet’.

The

film heralds the onset of Tarkovsky’s late period, which
would be rounded out by his last two features, Nostalgia
(1983) and The Sacrifice (1986).

Nostalgia was shot in Italy in the autumn of 1982.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 20

Tarkovsky had first visited the country 20 years earlier, when
Ivan’s Childhood had triumphed at Venice. In the summer of
1976, after the controversy surrounding Mirror had left
Tarkovsky disillusioned and bitter, he began making notes
for what would become Tempo di Viaggio (1980), his only
documentary. The film was finally shot in the summer of
1979, by which time Tarkovsky and the screenwriter Tonino
Guerra, his longtime friend, had had an idea – provisionally
entitled ‘The End of the World’ – that would turn into
Nostalgia.

The screenplay was completed in May 1980;

Tarkovsky then spent two years in a bureaucratic quagmire
before the film could be made. Soviet officials prevented the
film from winning the Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes Film
Festival, a scandal that enraged Tarkovsky and hardened his
resolve that he could no longer continue working in the
Soviet Union.

On 10 July 1984, Tarkovsky announced his intention to

remain in the West at a press conference in Milan. He had
considered defecting in 1981 during a trip to Sweden, but
concern for his wife and son prevented him from
proceeding.When he finally did make the decision to remain
in the West, his son was still in the Soviet Union, and would
not be allowed out until January 1986, by which time
Tarkovsky had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
His final film, The Sacrifice, won four prizes at the 1986
Cannes Film Festival, including the Grand Prix and the
Special Jury Prize.Tarkovsky was too ill to attend, so his son
Andrei Jr collected the prizes on his behalf. Tarkovsky
seemed to be in remission during the summer of 1986, but
the cancer returned. He died in Paris on 29 December 1986.

Tarkovsky did not live long enough to experience glas-

nost, although he predicted that, after his death, he would be
rehabilitated in his homeland. His prediction came true: a

2 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 21

major retrospective of his work was held at Dom Kino (the
House of Cinema) in the spring of 1987.The following year,
the original 205-minute cut of Andrei Rublev received its first
public screening. An Andrei Tarkovsky Memorial Prize was
established in 1989, its first recipient being the legendary
animator,Yuri Norstein. In April 1990, Tarkovsky was post-
humously awarded the Lenin Prize, the highest form of
recognition in the Soviet Union.

Tarkovsky and the Soviet Context

Tarkovsky made five feature films in the Soviet Union
between 1962 and 1979. All of them were seen – at least in
Western Europe – as major masterpieces, even one of which
would have guaranteed their director a place in cinema
history. Unlike some directors, such as his close friend Sergei
Parajanov (1924–90), who spent a number of years in prison
on trumped-up charges and whose career was badly
hampered by the authorities, Tarkovsky managed to remain
relatively free to pursue his vision, despite the fact that he
was not a Party man and his films did not conform to the
Socialist Realist norm that the Communist Party champi-
oned.This suggests that the Soviet system was not as mono-
lithic as we might be tempted to think it was, to say nothing
of Tarkovsky’s own tenacity. A brief overview of the Soviet
film industry will go some way towards helping us to appre-
ciate what obstacles a filmmaker in the Soviet Union had to
face and how that, in turn, played a part in shaping
Tarkovsky’s films.

The Soviet film industry, like every other walk of life in

the Soviet Union, was heavily centralised. Goskino, a body
founded in 1922, oversaw every aspect of filmmaking in the
USSR, having the final say on each stage of the production

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 22

of a film, from script approval, to green-lighting a film’s
release. All 40 or so studios across the Soviet Union were
answerable to Goskino, including the largest studio, Mosfilm
in Moscow, where Tarkovsky made all of his Soviet features.
During Tarkovsky’s career, Goskino was headed first by
Alexei Romanov (1963–72) and then by Filip Yermash
(1972–86), who would become something of a personal
nemesis for Tarkovsky.

Mosfilm, like the other studios, was comprised of various

departmental heads, who oversaw their respective areas –
such as production, scriptwriting and editing – together with
an artistic council made up of Mosfilm top brass, filmmakers
and Party officials. This council had the final say in how a
film should be distributed, either in Category 1 (wide release
in the major cinemas), or Category 2 (limited release in
smaller cinemas). Everyone at the studio was answerable to
the studio head. In Tarkovsky’s time, these were V Surin and
then Nilokai Sizov. Although Tarkovsky quickly developed a
reputation for being stubborn and refusing to make cuts in
his films, as we shall later see Goskino and Mosfilm officials
were not necessarily hostile to Tarkovsky just for the sake of
it; sometimes Tarkovsky took their feedback on board and
made changes to his films accordingly (especially in the case
of Mirror).

The process of getting a script approved was frequently a

long and frustrating one. A project would first be submitted
to the editor of the script department at the studio, who
would then review it before passing it up the hierarchy.
Finally, the script would arrive at the desk of the head of the
studio.The studio head could not, however, greenlight a film
until the whole process had been repeated at Goskino.
Despite these supposedly stringent controls, however, the
system was hampered by one major factor: during the mid to

2 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 23

late 1950s, the Soviet film industry began expanding at an
almost exponential rate, epitomised by the international
success of Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying, which
won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1957.

This resurgence owed a lot to the 20

Party Congress in

1956, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, thereby
precipitating the ‘Thaw’ that initiated the most liberal
cultural climate in the Soviet Union for 30 years. The film
industry thrived as a result. In 1955, 65 features were
produced; by the early 1960s, this had risen to over 100 per
year. Cinemas likewise doubled in number, from 59,000 in
1955 to 118,000 in 1965. Aside from Kalatozov, other direc-
tors rose to prominence between the late fifties and mid
sixties, such as Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko and Andrei
Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and the only two Soviet directors
Tarkovsky professed to admire, Otar Iosseliani and Sergei
Parajanov.

The very success of the Soviet film industry meant, iron-

ically, that theory (i.e., ideology) was not always practice.
Industry personnel were overworked, deadlines had to be
met, and scripts and films had to be approved. Once a script
had been approved, a director such as Tarkovsky, who
enjoyed an international reputation, would face very little, if
any, interference from either Mosfilm or Goskino during
shooting. Problems usually set in when Tarkovsky submitted
a film for approval. Discussions would be held, cuts would be
demanded, complaints would be lodged. As Tarkovsky often
rewrote his scripts while shooting them (especially in the
cases of Mirror and Stalker), this stage would often be fraught.

Tarkovsky would sometimes submit edits of his films that

he knew were too long, so that when calls came for cuts, he
would then cut the parts he was dissatisfied with, and could
thus show that he had complied with requests to shorten the

S E A N M A RT I N

2 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 24

film. Although Alexei Romanov personally screened every
film submitted for approval to Goskino, his successor, Filip
Yermash, often approved films for release without even
seeing them. However, as Tarkovsky was regarded abroad as
the most important Soviet director then working, all of his
films were subject to a great deal of scrutiny and debate
before – and after – they were released.

All of Tarkovsky’s Soviet features were released in

Category 2, with the exception of Solaris. He felt bitter about
this and came to feel that he was being persecuted.This sense
of persecution intensified as his career in the Soviet Union
progressed, until it became one of the chief reasons why he
decided to remain in the West after completing Nostalgia.
Ironically, while Tarkovsky did indeed battle relentlessly to
get his films made according to his wishes, in some respects
he enjoyed privileges not extended to other directors, some
of whom resented what they saw as Tarkovsky’s ‘special treat-
ment’. He travelled a good deal throughout the 1970s, for
example often accepting invitations to appear at film festi-
vals, sometimes even participating in jury activities (such as
at Locarno in 1972, when he was president of the jury).
Compared with his friend Parajanov, who was imprisoned
between 1974–7 and then again briefly in the early 1980s,
Tarkovsky’s situation might have been difficult and ulti-
mately impossible in the late 70s and early 80s, but at least he
remained at liberty to pursue his vision.

2 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 25

Theory and Practice

Tarkovsky’s films contain a number of recurring themes and
visual motifs, as well as narrative and stylistic devices that will
be examined in this chapter.We will also look at his theories
of the art of cinema, which he wrote about at length in his
book, Sculpting in Time (1984). It should be noted that
Tarkovsky was adamantly opposed to interpretation; instead,
he urged his audiences simply to watch his films.When asked
why there was so much rain in his films, Tarkovsky would
reply that it was always raining in Russia. Be that as it may, it
must also be noted that rain, for example, might have another
possible function in the films, such as cleansing or blessing.
The Polish director Krzysztof Kies´lowski explained that if a
cigarette lighter in a film doesn’t work, it means it doesn’t
work and nothing else. But on the rare occasion that a film-
maker can get it to mean something else, then they have
achieved a miracle. ‘Only one director in the world has
managed to achieve that miracle in the last few years,’ he
notes, ‘and that’s Tarkovsky.’

But before we examine Tarkovsky’s work in terms of its

thematic and poetic content, it is instructive to be reminded
of his working methods, aspects of which make his achieve-
ment all the more remarkable.

2 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 26

Working Methods: Development

With the exception of Ivan’s Childhood, on which he was a
hired-hand director, Tarkovsky initiated all of his projects
himself. How he chose what would be his next film was a
mysterious process that he did not fully understand. He notes
in his diary, ‘It is obviously a most mysterious, imperceptible
process. It carries on independently of ourselves, in the
subconscious, crystallising on the walls of the soul.’

(The

diaries furthermore attest to the fact that Tarkovsky contin-
ually entertained ideas about many projects, only a handful
of which he actually managed to realise – see Appendix II.)
But, for Tarkovsky, a project usually began with a feeling for
‘the inner state, the distinctive inner tension of the scenes to
be filmed, and the psychology of the characters.’

Once the ‘inner state’ had been glimpsed, Tarkovsky

would then pitch his idea to a potential screenwriting collab-
orator. He regarded screenwriting as a separate discipline
from literature. ‘I do not understand why anyone with
literary talent should ever want to be a scriptwriter,’ he
declares in Sculpting in Time, his reasons being that a script
will inevitably change during the course of development,
shooting and postproduction. The script should only be
treated as a blueprint for the film: ‘If a scenario is a brilliant
piece of literature, then it is far better that it should remain
as prose.’

Tarkovsky worked with a co-writer on all of his films, bar

The Sacrifice, which he wrote alone. Vladimir Akimov, a
screenwriter who knew him (but never worked with him),
believed that Tarkovsky essentially used his co-writer as a
sounding board on which to test new ideas, and also as
someone who would ensure that good scenes were not cut
on a whim,

as one notable feature of Tarkovsky’s working

2 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 27

method was its organic nature: scripts and films would be
constantly changing as Tarkovsky’s understanding grew as to
what each scene or film required.

Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky was Tarkovsky’s first

collaborator, with whom he co-wrote The Steamroller and the
Violin, Ivan’s Childhood and Andrei Rublev.

On the first two

of these, they shared the writing more or less equally,
although on Ivan’s Childhood, their work was to modify an
existing script to make it conform to Tarkovsky’s conception
of the film. Tarkovsky apparently began writing Andrei
Rublev on his own, but called Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky in
for later drafts. Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky noted that
Tarkovsky would always work from his intuition, which
would frequently exasperate him. During work on Andrei
Rublev, the two of them decamped to Georgia for a writing
retreat. In a break from working on the script, they went out
for a walk, hoping to resolve their current impasse, but
Tarkovsky, rather than telling his collaborator what he
wanted, began talking about the buds on the trees that they
were walking past. Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky later accused
Tarkovsky of being pretentious, and the two men parted
company. (The feeling, it has to be said, was mutual.)

Tarkovsky had a much better working relationship with

Alexander Misharin, with whom he wrote Mirror. Tarkovsky
knew some of the episodes he wanted, but he and Misharin
first talked at length about what they remembered of their
childhoods in order to arrive at the others. Once this process
was complete, they wrote scenes individually and would meet
every day to read what they had written. Working like this,
they wrote the script in two weeks. Before and during
shooting, the script was then rewritten on a daily basis, with
Misharin feeling that ‘Tarkovsky knew what he wanted but
was unable to articulate it.’

Unusually for a writer, Misharin

S E A N M A RT I N

2 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 28

was also consulted about the edit, and would sometimes sit in
with Tarkovsky and the film’s editor, Ludmila Feiginova.

Tarkovsky’s intuitive approach resulted in tense and

stormy relationships with authors whose work he adapted,
namely Vladimir Bogomolov (Ivan’s Childhood), Stanislaw
Lem (Solaris) and the Strugatsky brothers (Stalker). The
dream sequences in Ivan’s Childhood, which were one of the
things Bogomolov objected to, were present in the script as
soon as Tarkovsky started work on the film, which again
suggests that he knew what he wanted from the beginning.
Similarly, his approach to adapting Solaris, which he did with
Friedrich Gorenstein, was to make the material his own,
rather than trying to film Lem’s novel as it was written. Lem
was furious that the Earth scenes were in the film (in the first
draft three-quarters of the action took place on Earth), and
was also displeased that Tarkovsky did not seem to be inter-
ested in the theme of the novel, that of the progress of
science and knowledge, but instead supplied his own,
revolving around familial concerns and his love of nature.

On Stalker, Tarkovsky was actually collaborating with the

authors of the original novel, but a broadly analogous situa-
tion arose when Arkady Strugatsky, frustrated by the endless
rewrites and Tarkovsky’s vagueness about what he wanted,
suggested dropping the science fiction element of the story.
Tarkovsky immediately beamed ‘like a cat that has eaten its
owner’s parrot’,

and admitted this was what he had been

wanting for a long time but had not wanted to offend the
brothers by suggesting it.

Working Methods: Production

From Andrei Rublev onwards, Tarkovsky was in complete
control once shooting had started, with no external interfer-

2 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 29

ence. He was fanatically involved in all aspects of production,
having the last word on set design, costume and choice of
location. Although some saw this as dictatorial behaviour,
Tarkovsky viewed it as part of the director’s job. In the docu-
mentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, his second wife and
widow Larissa quotes from his diary: ‘Never trouble anyone
else with what you can do yourself.’

Tarkovsky was also highly selective about which actors he

would use. He preferred to use the same actors as often as
possible, and built up a company of actors whom he would
use again and again, including Nikolai Grinko, Anatoly
Solonitsyn, Irma Rausch, Stefan Krylov, Nikolai Burlyaev,
Yuri Nazarov, Sos Sarkissian, Olga Kizilova, Tamara
Ogorodnikova, Oleg Yankovsky, Erland Josephson and
Margarita Terekhova. He favoured the same approach with
his crew, and in addition to his collaborations with Vadim
Yusov, Tarkovsky also developed long standing relationships
with composers Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov and Eduard
Artemyev, costume designer Nelly Fomina, editor Ludmila
Feiginova, sound recordists Inna Zelentsova and Semyon
Litvinov, make-up artist Vera Rudina, assistant director
Masha Chugunova and musical director Emil Kachaturian.

Although some of his shoots were a purgatorial experi-

ence for all concerned (especially Stalker), nearly everyone
who worked with him admired him and some professed an
almost fanatical loyalty to him. Once his collaborators had
earned Tarkovsky’s trust, he would welcome suggestions
from them provided that they stayed within the overall
framework he had established. Tarkovsky himself would
frequently diverge from the script, and his films, despite
looking carefully thought out, are in fact partially the result
of improvisation on set. Because time was not so pressing a
factor as it was when he came to work in the West, he would

S E A N M A RT I N

3 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 30

often halt filming for a few days in order to solve a problem,
rehearse or wait for props to arrive. With intense rehearsals
and a strong intuition of what he wanted (even if he was not
able to articulate himself clearly), Tarkovsky was able to get
what he wanted usually in only one or two takes. Given that
many of his takes are lengthy and involve careful choreog-
raphy, this is little short of remarkable. At Mosfilm, he was
known as ‘One-Take Tarkovsky’.

Tarkovsky’s closest relationship during shooting was always

with his director of photography. That the visual style of his
films was essentially Tarkovsky’s own is borne out by the fact
that, after his collaboration with Vadim Yusov ended with
Solaris, each subsequent film was shot by a different camera-
man: Georgy Rerberg (Mirror); Alexander Knyazhinsky
(Stalker); Giuseppe Lanci (Nostalgia); and Sven Nykvist (The
Sacrifice). For Knyazhinsky, Tarkovsky was one of the few
directors who understood film as being, above all else, essen-
tially a visual medium (as opposed to a dramatic medium, like
theatre) and remembers Tarkovsky saying that ‘if they got the
images right, the film was sure to be a success’.

Lanci

admitted that working with Tarkovsky was a ‘most enriching’
experience, and felt that, in order to shoot the film according
to Tarkovsky’s vision, he had to try to enter Tarkovsky’s poetic
world more and more each day, until Lanci ‘[felt] as he did, to
think as he did. And it was a tremendous experience, unre-
peatable… working with him one could risk anything… he
was always nearby to give you courage, to give you strength
to achieve the objectives that the film required.’

Working Methods: Post-Production

Ludmila Feiginova cut all of Tarkovsky’s Soviet features, with
the exception of Ivan’s Childhood, on which she was an

3 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 31

assistant. As there were rarely more than one or two takes to
choose from, her job was mainly to decide where to begin
and end each individual shot.Tarkovsky also hardly ever shot
scenes that didn’t make it into the final film, the main excep-
tion being the ‘mirror room’ from Solaris.

Feiginova’s other

main task was to determine – in conjunction with Tarkovsky
himself – how to shorten scenes. This played a big part in
appeasing the authorities, in that if they demanded cuts,
Tarkovsky would cut something and then say that he had
shortened the film, hoping that the authorities would not
notice that things they objected to were still in the film. As
with his collaborators during the actual shooting, Tarkovsky
allowed Feiginova to contribute ideas. Indeed, some of her
suggestions were inspired, such as the moving of the stut-
tering boy scene to the beginning of Mirror, or the moving
of the speech by Stalker’s wife from the bar to the flat, where,
instead of addressing the three men, she now appears to
address the audience directly. Feiginova was also present at
the mixing and dubbing of Tarkovsky’s Soviet films.

In the West,Tarkovsky’s main editing problems concerned

the fact that he wasn’t allowed to start cutting until the film
had been shot, which had been contrary to his practice in
the Soviet Union. ‘Practical considerations, such as lack of
time for rehearsal, also meant that Tarkovsky went beyond his
usual one or two takes when working in the West, but, given
that he was covering his scenes in much the same way as in
the Soviet Union, the editorial decisions involved on
Nostalgia and The Sacrifice were very much the same.’

Tarkovsky’s relationship with composers was as

unorthodox as the rest of his working practice. Usually, a
composer would be called in to score a film once it had been
shot, which is what happened with Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
when he worked on The Steamroller and the Violin and Ivan’s

S E A N M A RT I N

3 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 32

Childhood. However, when Tarkovsky started work on Andrei
Rublev, he asked Ovchinnikov to compose some music for
the Kulikovo Field battle scene while the script was still
being written. As it turned out, the scene wasn’t shot, and
Tarkovsky used some of the music in the epilogue without
consulting Ovchinnikov first.The inevitable row meant that
the two men would not work together again.

Ovchinnikov’s replacement was Eduard Artemyev, whom

Tarkovsky met while he was preparing Solaris. Tarkovsky was
interested in Artemyev’s electronic music, believing that it
was the way to dispense with a conventional score altogether,
which he felt that films did not really need.As a result, much
of the music Artemyev composed for Tarkovsky has an
abstract, ambient quality to it. The main exceptions are
arrangements of the Bach prelude used in Solaris, and the
opening theme of Stalker, which is an amalgam of plainchant
and Indian music.Tarkovsky felt that music in films was best
used as a refrain, which, when repeated throughout a film,
would ‘[open] up the possibility of a new, transfigured
impression of the same material… The meaning… is not
changed, but the [film] takes on a new colouring…
Perception is deepened.’

Tarkovsky believed that sounds could be as important as

music, if not more so, and his soundtracks are rich in natural
sounds. In his last two films, he abandoned a conventional
score altogether, using instead a collage of classical music and
natural sounds. Owe Svensson, the sound designer on The
Sacrifice, remembers Tarkovsky giving him a list of around
250 sound effects that he wanted for the film. Svensson
realised that this would have swamped the film, and
proceeded to strip down the list. In the end, they settled on
the shepherdess’s call as the film’s refrain, which is heard
whenever something out of the ordinary occurs. Tarkovsky

3 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 33

also did not want to hear any birds in the film, apart from
swallows. As the film was shot in a bird sanctuary on the
Swedish island of Gotland, this proved impossible:‘The noise
[was] overwhelming,’ Svensson noted, ‘it [defied] descrip-
tion.’

As a result, the whole film, like all of Tarkovsky’s

previous films, was post-synched.

In re-recording dialogue,Tarkovsky usually made sure that

the actors’ breathing was audible in the mix, a subtle effect,
but one that almost completely closes the distance between
the characters on-screen and the viewer, making the charac-
ters’ experience tangible to the audience. As with his use of
music and sound, Tarkovsky’s mixes played their part in
deepening the films, rather than explaining them.

Against Interpretation

Tarkovsky was adamantly opposed to any intellectual inter-
pretation of his films. Films in general, and his films in partic-
ular, are first and foremost an emotional experience. The
viewer does not have to pick up on all of Tarkovsky’s refer-
ences to be able to appreciate and be stimulated by one of
his films. Indeed, he would perhaps be more kindly disposed
towards viewers who reacted to his work in a totally personal
way, rather than someone who over-intellectualised the
experience of watching them and what they mean.
Tarkovsky’s narrative technique aided this process, in that he
often put things into his films that were deliberately
puzzling. When asked, for instance, about the unexplained
reappearance of the Holy Fool at the end of Andrei Rublev
when she is seen sane and richly dressed, Tarkovsky simply
remarked ‘Let them make of it what they will.’

Tarkovsky was frequently asked what his films meant, and

he would often reply that they meant nothing other than

S E A N M A RT I N

3 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 34

what they were. Rain did not symbolise anything, but was
‘typical of the landscape in which I grew up,’

while the dog

in Stalker was ‘just a dog’,

or ‘the Zone is a zone’.

Tarkovsky drew a distinction between images and symbols,
and felt that his films were composed solely of the former.
What seems to have annoyed him about the concept of
symbolism is that once a person thinks they have understood
or explained a symbol, they cease to have an active relation-
ship with it, and the symbol effectively dies.While Tarkovsky
was sincere in his beliefs that films did not have symbolic
value, he is being somewhat disingenuous, and he even made
a number of statements to the contrary. The Zone, he
admitted, while being just ‘a zone’, also symbolised the trials
and tribulations of life itself,

while the watering of the tree

in The Sacrifice ‘for me is a symbol of faith’.

Given that Tarkovsky’s position was at times paradoxical,

the following treatments of some of his most frequently used
devices, themes and images should be read advisedly. Things
may be symbolic, they may not; they may imply one thing,
but could easily mean another. Ultimately, a personal
response to the films is of more value than any attempt to
explain them.

Speech and Silence

Tarkovsky’s use of speech and silence varies depending upon
the context. Andrei Rublev and Alexander in The Sacrifice
take vows of silence but for different reasons. Rublev’s
silence is a protest against both his own sins and those of the
world at large, while Alexander’s silence is part of his bargain
with God, and an act of faith. Conversely, for the Stutterer
(Mirror) and Little Man (The Sacrifice again), the regaining of
speech and articulacy is a sign of hope. But, in general,

3 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 35

Tarkovsky distrusts language or, more specifically, the
language of speech and the rational intellect. The speech of
poetry, on the other hand, is something in which he does
have faith, given the number of times poems are recited in
his films. Poetry, for Tarkovsky, is the form of linguistic
expression that is as close as we can get to life itself; it is a
manifestation of truths beyond language.

Art and the Artist

Tarkovsky’s love of painting recurs throughout his work.
When his films show art – whether it’s Dürer’s Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse in Ivan’s Childhood, Breughel’s Hunters in the
Snow in Solaris or Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi in The
Sacrifice – they are doing so for a number of reasons.
Tarkovsky was acutely aware that cinema is a relatively young
art form, and showing paintings in his films is an attempt to
ennoble this young and frequently debased form. Paintings
also serve to comment on the action or characters. The
ambiguous expression Leonardo has captured in his portrait
of Ginevra de Benci (shown in Mirror) is ‘inexpressibly beau-
tiful… and at the same time repulsive’, and is introduced into
the film in order to ‘emphasise… in the actress, Margarita
Terekhova, the same capacity to at once enchant and to
repel’.

Paintings also influenced Tarkovsky’s methods of covering

a scene. He speaks of his admiration for Carpaccio in
Sculpting in Time (see the chapter on Andrei Rublev), and one
of the things that one notices in looking at Carpaccio is his
use of a frontal viewpoint, which Tarkovsky uses almost
exclusively from his second feature onwards. In his interiors,
Carpaccio also places his characters off to one side, with a
great deal of empty space around them (such as in his depic-

S E A N M A RT I N

3 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 36

tions of St Augustine in his study, or of St Ursula), a tech-
nique Tarkovsky would come to use more and more, espe-
cially from Stalker onwards. Tarkovsky spoke of Carpaccio’s
work being humanistic

and, by allying himself visually with

the Venetian, he is subtly informing us that his cinema is built
upon those same values.

One of Tarkovsky’s favourite devices, that of depicting a

character in two logically impossible spaces in the same shot,
is also derived from paintings, in particular mediaeval saints’
lives. The frequent ‘still lives’ in the films – the tea cups on
the table in the rain in Solaris, the comb and Bible in
Nostalgia, the mirror, cup and stereo in The Sacrifice to name
but three – also echo the painterly device of the memento
mori, objects which serve to remind the person contem-
plating the painting that life is transitory. Alternatively, these
still lives could be related to Japanese art, which Tarkovsky
admired greatly. In the oriental tradition, obviously finite
things, such as the corner of a room or the view from a
window, represented the infinite. In the context of the films,
it could be that Tarkovsky senses a numinous quality in the
everyday or forgotten corners of our lives.

Artists recur in Tarkovsky’s work from the beginning – in

Ivan’s Childhood, Masha and Kholin talk in reverential tones
about writers and painters, a viewpoint that was Tarkovsky’s
own. Although Tarkovsky’s adult artist heroes – Rublev,
Alexei,Writer, Gorchakov, Alexander – all experience crises,
Tarkovsky sees these characters as being the vital conduits
through which humanity expresses itself and will ultimately
save itself. The artist, in other words, has a moral obligation
to serve others and to play a part in making a better world,
a theme Tarkovsky returns to again and again in Sculpting in
Time.

3 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 37

The Apocalypse

For much of his life, Tarkovsky was preoccupied with the
idea of the end of the world, and all of his films contain an
element of apocalyptic crisis, either for the characters
personally (such as Rublev’s horror at both the Tartar atroc-
ities and his own crime, and his subsequent vow of silence
and refusal to paint), or for society as a whole (the war in
Ivan’s Childhood, ecological collapse in Stalker or nuclear war
in The Sacrifice). Apocalypse becomes more of a preoccupa-
tion in the films after Mirror, where the desire to save the
world from itself is also linked with the idea of personal
rebirth.

This idea is illustrated in his lecture on the Apocalypse

given in London in 1984. ‘It would be wrong to consider
that the Book of Revelation only contains within itself a
concept of punishment, of retribution; it seems to me that
what it contains above all, is hope. The time is near, yes
indeed, for each one of us the time is indeed very, very close
at hand. But for all of us together? It is never too late. So yes,
the Book of Revelation is a fearful book for each of us indi-
vidually, but for all of us together, as one, there it is as a book
of hope.’

The Holy Fool

Russian literary tradition has a long history of Holy Fools,
the most well known of them being Dostoyevsky’s Prince
Myshkin, the titular hero of The Idiot. They are present in
most of Tarkovsky’s films, beginning with the old man in the
ruined house in Ivan’s Childhood. His successors were the
idiot girl in Andrei Rublev, the Stalker, Domenico (Nostalgia)
and Alexander (The Sacrifice). All of them are related to an

S E A N M A RT I N

3 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 38

apocalyptic situation (World War II and the Tartar invasions
in the first two cases, actual planetary catastrophe in the last
three), although it is only his last three films that the Holy
Fool becomes a central character. In each case, they are char-
acters of faith who see the true condition of the world, and
yearn for its renewal, a renewal that could be signified by
motifs as varied as the sunlit childhood dreams of Ivan’s
Childhood, or the simple life lived in harmony with oneself
and nature that Domenico calls for in Nostalgia. It is only
through faith and self-sacrifice that this renewal can take
place, but who is willing to listen to the words of a madman?
That is the dilemma Tarkovsky offers to us for consideration.

Levitation and Flight

Tarkovsky once remarked that he included levitation in his
films ‘Simply because the scene[s have] a great power. This
way, things can be created that are more filmic, more photo-
genic.’

However, as the two scenes of genuine levitation (in

Mirror and The Sacrifice) both happen above beds, it could be
argued that they are metaphors for sexual love and pleasure.
Hari’s and Kelvin’s floating around the library in Solaris,
while ascribed in the film to weightlessness, is in the same
vein, although here, it has a pronouncedly elegiac feel.
Nostalgia contains implied levitation, in the form of the preg-
nant Maria lying on Gorchakov’s hotel bed. As the lighting
mysteriously changes, she appears to be floating just above
the bed.

Flight, on the other hand, is not used so uniformly.When

Ivan dreams of flying through the treetops in Ivan’s
Childhood, it is a symbol of happiness, or, more specifically, of
lost happiness.The balloon flights in Andrei Rublev and Mirror
are linked with the idea of artistic striving (in the former

3 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 39

instance) and national striving (in the latter). Both end in
failure, but Tarkovsky admires the very attempt itself to reach
upwards towards God.

Nature and the Four Elements

‘I am… puzzled when I am told that people cannot simply
enjoy watching nature,’Tarkovsky wrote.

His films are full

of shots of the natural world, in particular trees, grass, water
(usually in the form of rain, brooks and snow) and wind.
Although Tarkovsky’s love of nature is an undeniable
element for it having such a prominent role in his work, it
would seem to have another function. In the films up to and
including Mirror, nature is fecund and fertile, and Tarkovsky’s
depiction of it verges on the pantheistic

(and possibly even

the pagan), although it should be noted that, in the Eastern
Church, nature is not seen as fallen, but as something inher-
ently good that is an essential part of the divine plan. Nature
is the keeper of secrets and wisdom to which Tarkovsky’s
characters seem to be oblivious, with the country doctor in
Mirror being perhaps the sole exception:‘Has it ever occurred
to you that plants can feel, know, even comprehend,’ he asks
Maria. ‘They don’t run about. Like us who are rushing,
fussing, uttering banalities. That’s because we don’t trust the
Nature that’s inside us.’

In the later films, nature has become a symbol for the

wrong turning that humanity has taken. In Stalker, despite the
apparent fertility of the Zone, nature is polluted, which is
both a literal truth and a metaphor for the spiritual atrophy of
the modern world. In Nostalgia and The Sacrifice, Nature is
seemingly abandoned and ignored, although it seems to retain
something of its old pantheistic power, and in the latter film,
the dead tree becomes a symbol of hope and rebirth.

S E A N M A RT I N

4 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 40

Fire and water are often seen as being important motifs in

Tarkovsky’s cinema. Fire traditionally purifies but also
destroys, while water washes and cleanses. Although fire is
present in every film in the form of candles, bonfires, self-
immolation, buildings ablaze and flares, water would seem to
be the element with which Tarkovksy felt the most kinship.
‘Water is very important,’ he said in an interview.‘[It] is alive,
it has depth, it moves, it changes, it reflects like mirror.’

Earth largely appears in the form of mud, which could be
interpreted as being the opposite of flight.Where the former
has characters flying upwards, mud firmly reminds them that
they are inherently earthbound, and it is on Earth that their
destinies must be found, and lived out. Air is perhaps the
most numinous element for Tarkovsky; it usually occurs in
the form of sudden winds that blow up, most memorably in
Mirror and Stalker.

Animals

The role of animals in Tarkovsky’s work is analogous to that
of Nature herself. Horses and dogs appear most frequently. In
Andrei Rublev, aside from their practical use as transport, they
are a symbol of natural ease, of life without the struggles of
ego and intellect (one recalls the horse enjoying a roll near
the river bank early on in the film and also the horses eating
the apples on the beach in Ivan’s Childhood). It is this natu-
ralness that the characters in Solaris have lost, exemplified by
Berton’s son being terrified by the stabled horse. In Nostalgia,
they help unite the concept of Nature with the idea of home
and a place of belonging (the horse being seen more than
once near the dacha). Paradoxically, horses may also be seen
as bringers of death and harbingers of the Apocalypse. In
Andrei Rublev they bring the Tartar hordes to Vladimir, while

4 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 41

in Ivan’s Childhood we see them in Dürer’s engraving
carrying the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is the pale
horse that brings death, and pale horses appear in both
Nostalgia and The Sacrifice.

Dogs are also frequently seen in Tarkovsky’s films.

Although, as we have noted, he claimed that the dog in
Stalker was ‘just a dog’, it also acts as a mediator between the
worlds of dreaming and waking, as it first appears in what
seems to be a dream and then is present in waking reality, and
also between the Zone and the world outside it, as it accom-
panies the men on their journey back. The boxer in Solaris
likewise appears on Earth, in the home movie and also in
Kelvin’s room on the station during his delirium, suggesting
that it is an integral part of Kelvin’s experience of life, but
unlike Kelvin himself, appears to be able to negotiate its way
safely between the worlds of Earth, memory and the station.
In Nostalgia, the Alsatian links Gorchakov not only with his
memories of home, but also with Domenico and the ritual
act that he must perform in the pool.

Dreams

Dreams, memories, visions and reveries are an integral part
of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. Traditionally, dreams are heralded by
such clichés as watery dissolves and harp music.Tarkovsky, on
the other hand, does not inform the viewer of when a dream
begins or ends, nor even of who the dreamer is. In the latter
films, it also becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is
‘dream’ and what is ‘real’.

Experience for Tarkovsky broadly falls into two cate-

gories, the outer world of historical events and the timeless
inner world. It is to this latter world that dreams belong.
They often illuminate the characters’ states of mind: Ivan’s

S E A N M A RT I N

4 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 42

visions of the childhood he never had, Kelvin’s attempts to
make things up with his mother, Gorchakov’s longing for
home. It could even be argued that the real dramas of
Tarkovsky’s films are internal, with their concerns being the
way in which the internal world affects the external world.
In the last three films, this becomes modified to suggest that
the internal world must become externalised in order to save
the latter.

Wives and Mothers

Women in Tarkovsky’s films are generally confined to the
roles of wife or mother, and the two are often blurred, as in
Solaris and Mirror, or between wife and lover (or potential
lover) as in Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. The great inner strug-
gles that Tarkovsky’s heroes undergo appear to be an exclu-
sively male preserve. Tarkovsky’s belief that woman’s driving
force is ‘submission, humiliation in the name of love’

seems

to place him firmly as an old-fashioned chauvinist of the first
order, and his female characters are often dependent upon
men – such as Eugenia in Nostalgia – or are remote, unreach-
able figures – Maria in Nostalgia or Kelvin’s mother in Solaris.
That women are portrayed in this way is almost certainly due
to Tarkovsky’s own problematic relationships with women,
specifically his mother, his two wives and his stepdaughter.
(Significantly, he did not have difficulties with his actresses.)

It would be a mistake, however, to write Tarkovsky off as

some sort of unreconstructed dinosaur. Two of his female
characters, Hari in Solaris and the Stalker’s wife (and possibly
even daughter too, with her telekinetic powers), are remark-
ably strong characters. The same could possibly also be said
of Maria in Mirror, who resourcefully cares for her children
during the privations of wartime.Tarkovsky’s assertion that a

4 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 43

woman’s strength comes from her ability to sacrifice herself,
which at first may appear to be politically incorrect, is, in
fact, his roundabout way of admitting that he admires
women because they can do what he himself cannot, give
themselves unconditionally in the name of love. ‘What is
love?’ he muses in his diary.‘I don’t know.’

It should also be

noted that some of Tarkovsky’s most ardent supporters have
been women, such as the critics Maya Turovskaya and Olga
Surkova. Had there been something inherently misogynistic
about Tarkovsky’s films, this support would not have been
forthcoming.

Images of Home

Tarkovsky portrays home almost always as a dacha in the
country. Although in Mirror and Nostalgia it is a place that
only appears in dreams and to which the hero longs to
return, in Solaris and The Sacrifice it is a place of unresolved
familial tensions. As if reflecting dream logic in the former
instance and the tangle of family emotions in the latter, the
interiors of these dachas are always ambiguously arranged,
with rooms seemingly moving around in relation to one
another.

Various motifs are associated with home: spilt milk, lace

curtains, glass containers, and books recur. The books are
always art monographs; we have already noted the role of
paintings in Tarkovsky’s films. It is highly possible that milk,
lace and objects made of glass are in the films not only
because Tarkovsky associated them with home, but also
because he found them visually fascinating.

S E A N M A RT I N

4 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 44

Stylistic Devices: The Camera

Tarkovsky rarely blocked his scenes in a conventional way.
Whereas traditional film grammar would dictate the use of
establishing shots to begin a scene, moving into close-ups
and shot–reverse shot for a conversation, Tarkovsky usually
employed a restricted vocabulary of camera movements with
which to cover his scenes, with increasingly lengthy takes.
Tarkovsky’s camera will frequently pan around a room,
following a character (usually keeping them in the middle of
the frame), a device used most frequently in Andrei Rublev,
Solaris and Mirror. In Stalker, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice, the
pan is replaced by imperceptibly slow zooms.Tracking shots
feature in all the films. As with shot length, these tracking
shots get longer in the later films, with Nostalgia and The
Sacrifice both featuring tracks of around nine minutes each.

Other favoured devices include placing a character in two

logically impossible places within the same shot, such as in the
tracking shot in Nostalgia that shows Maria and the children
twice in the same unbroken take, an effect achieved by simply
getting the actors to run around the back of the camera once
it has left them to hit new marks in time for the camera to
pick them up again in the new space.

Tarkovsky was also

fond of shooting his actors from behind, or from an oblique
angle, such as in the post-credits shot of Maria sitting on the
fence in Mirror, or the conversation between Gorchakov and
Eugenia in the hotel lobby in Nostalgia. The camera often
simply watches in wide shot as the characters go about their
business, which tends to occur in the later films, or follows
them through sinuous corridors and walkways, such as in
Andrei Rublev and Mirror. As Tarkovsky’s films got increasingly
metaphysical and philosophical, so his camera movements
became more measured and carefully choreographed.

4 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 45

Stylistic Devices: Colour

Tarkovsky argued that although the real world obviously
exists in colour, once this is reproduced on-screen the
colours become a distraction if they are simply reproduced
as they are. A film made like this ‘will have the same sort of
appeal as the luxuriously illustrated glossy magazine; the
colour photography will be warring against the expressive-
ness of the image’.

This use of colour, he felt, was the same

technique as that used by painters; cinema had to find its
own way to use colour. Black and white, while less realistic,
was more truthful, and for this reason Tarkovsky shot Andrei
Rublev using this process.The epilogue was in colour to show
that Rublev’s life had been transformed by his art (in other
words, Tarkovsky felt it permissible to show ‘painterly’
colours).

Tarkovsky was well aware, though, that black and white

was no longer the norm, and decided that the best way
forward was in ‘alternating colour and monochrome
sequences, so that the impression made by the complete
spectrum is spaced out, toned down’.

In addition to using

monochrome,Tarkovsky also tried to minimise the impact of
colour by using a deliberately restricted colour palette. From
Solaris onwards, all of his films were shot using this method.

Tarkovsky used this concept of alternation in Solaris and

Mirror, although the shooting of scenes in black and white
was sometimes a matter of necessity, as he ran out of colour
stock at times on both films. With Stalker, Tarkovsky used
sepia-tinted black and white for the world outside the Zone,
and muted colour for the world within it; sepia was also used
in some of the dreams. Nostalgia and The Sacrifice both share
a consistent use of colour, where black and white is used for
dreams, memories and reveries, and colour for normal

S E A N M A RT I N

4 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 46

waking reality. (Although in the case of the latter film, this is
problematic – see the chapter on The Sacrifice, below.)

Stylistic Devices: Sound

As with colour, Tarkovsky’s use of sound was aimed at
attaining ‘truth’ over ‘realism’. His method for achieving this
was to abstract certain sounds by not revealing their source
(for example, the woman’s song in the first episode of Andrei
Rublev, the whistle or recorder in Mirror,

the passing trains

in Stalker, the buzz saw in Nostalgia or the shepherdess’s calls
to her flock in The Sacrifice). In this way, sound helps to unify
the various dramatic and colour planes of the films
(dreaming and waking, colour and monochrome) and also
works with them to create an additional mystery that the
viewer can experience but not necessarily explain. Put
simply,Tarkovsky used sound to create depth.As with his use
of camera movements, it is a way of drawing the viewer into
the world he has created, and also of ensuring that that world
will stay with the viewer long after the film has finished.

Imprinted Time

Tarkovsky’s theories about film, and art in general, were
published, together with autobiographical reflections, in his
book Sculpting in Time, which was written in collaboration
with the critic Olga Surkova.

The book had been gestating

for many years in the Soviet Union, until it was finally
published in German in 1984 and in English two years later.
Tarkovsky saw himself as being part of the great nineteenth-
century Russian literary tradition and felt a close affinity
with Pushkin,Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.Tarkovsky wrote that
‘art is born wherever there is a timeless and insatiable

4 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 47

longing for the spiritual, for the ideal’.

Artists, for Tarkovsky, are servants of the people, sensing

their deepest needs, and the works of art that they create exist
in order to shape people’s souls.The artist is also, according to
Pushkin, the servant of the Divine: ‘Stand, Prophet, you are
my will/Be my witness. Go/Through all seas and lands.With
the Word/Burn the hearts of the people.’

Adherence to such

beliefs places Tarkovsky firmly within the Romantic tradition
and makes his views on art somewhat unfashionable in the
current critical climate, but, as Nick James argues, this is
precisely what makes him still relevant: ‘There’s still a pro-
found need for the notion of the great artist as film-maker,
and nobody fits the profile better than Tarkovsky.’

Tarkovsky also outlines his theories on filmmaking in the

book. The first chapter is the earliest, being based on an
article first published in 1964, in which Tarkovsky outlined
his theory of a form of cinema based entirely on memory.
What was to be portrayed on-screen would not be external
actions, but the hero’s thoughts, dreams and memories.
Tarkovsky hoped that by taking this approach, it would be
possible to ‘achieve something highly significant: the expres-
sion, the portrayal, of the hero’s individual personality, and
the revelation of his interior world’.

Underlying this approach is the use of poetic, not

dramatic, logic, as ‘poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by
which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the
logic of traditional drama’.

Not only was poetry closer to

life, but it meant that a film based on poetic principles would
involve the spectator in an active role: ‘he becomes a partic-
ipant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by
ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers
by the author’.

In other words, Tarkovsky is calling upon

his audience to bring their own lives and experience to the

S E A N M A RT I N

4 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 48

film, in order to bring the film most fully to life.

But poetic logic was not the only tool at Tarkovsky’s

disposal. Time was a concept which preoccupied him for
nearly all of his career, both in the wider, historical sense, and
also in the immediate sense of the time it takes to watch a
film. In Andrei Rublev, the closing sequence showing
Rublev’s work in full colour sweeps away the centuries
between his era and that of the viewer, implying that the
concerns of Rublev’s era are also very much those of our
own. But it is in Mirror, his most autobiographical film, that
Tarkovsky explores time most comprehensively, not just in
the historical linear sense, but also in the ways in which the
past and the present interact with each other through the
prism of human consciousness and conscience.

It was in the ‘narrower’ sense of the running time of a

film, however, that Tarkovsky’s ideas about time reached their
most radical. He believed that time was the essential building
block of cinema, and he stands diametrically opposed to
Eisenstein’s theory of montage, which holds that a film is
made in the editing room.Tarkovsky proposed that if a take
is lengthened, boredom naturally sets in for the audience. But
if the take is extended even further, something else arises:
curiosity. Tarkovsky is essentially proposing giving the audi-
ence time to inhabit the world that the take is showing us,
not to watch it, but to look at it, to explore it.Tarkovsky’s films
are experiential and phenomenological in that they see the
world from eye level, and move through it at walking pace.
This is not something arbitrary, but something that
Tarkovsky believed would open up new possibilities both for
the filmmaker and the audience, where the dreams, memo-
ries and experience of both would meet in the experience
of going to the cinema. A film, therefore, is not an escape
from life, but a deepening of it.

4 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 49

The Student Films

The Killers (1956)

Alternate Title(s):

None

Russian Title:

Ubijtsi

Production Company:

VGIK

Directors:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Gordon, Marika

Beiku
Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Alexander Gordon, based

on the short story by Ernest Hemingway
Directors of Photography:

Alfredo Alvares, Alexander

Rybin
Directing Instructor:

Mikhail Romm

Cinematography Instructor

: AV Galperin

Cast:

Yuli Fait (Nick Adams), Alexander Gordon (George,

the café owner), Valentin Vinogradov (Al), Vadim Novikov
(Max), Yuri Dubrovin (first customer), Andrei Tarkovsky
(second customer, ‘whistling’ customer), Vassily Shukshin
(Ole Andreson)
Running Time:

19 mins

Shot:

Autumn 1956

First Screening:

1956 (VGIK)

Release in West:

2003 (DVD release)

5 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 50

Storyline

Two men in overcoats – Al and Max – enter a café. George,
the waiter, takes their orders.They intimidate George and the
sole customer, Nick Adams, by disparagingly calling them
‘bright boys’. Al and Max’s food is brought out. They order
the cook to come out. He does so, and Al leads him and Nick
into the kitchen. George asks Max what’s going on.

Al, sitting in the kitchen by the serving hatch, tells Max to

move, enabling him to see the door better. Al is holding a
machine gun. Max tells George that they are going to kill a
Swede, and asks him if he knows Ole Andreson. George
replies that he does, that he comes in to eat at 6pm. The
clock behind the bar shows 5.40pm. George asks Max why
they want to kill Andreson. Max replies, ‘to oblige a friend’.

Al tells Max to shut up, that he talks too much, and that

he’s got the cook and Nick bound and gagged. George wants
to know what will happen to them ‘afterwards’. Max doesn’t
give him a straight answer.

A customer enters. He is told that the cook has gone out

for half an hour, and leaves.

They wait. Another man is seen outside. Al cocks his gun.

The man comes in. It is not Andreson. He orders sandwiches
to go and whistles a tune while George makes the sand-
wiches in the kitchen.

The customer leaves. A third man enters and is told the

cook is ill. He leaves, indignant. Then, seeing that Andreson
has not shown up at his usual time, Al and Max leave.

Nick – freed off-screen by George – calls on Andreson to

warn him.The Swede seems resigned, saying that he’s not left
his room all day. Nick offers to call the police. Andreson tells
him not to.

Nick returns to the café and reports what happened to

5 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 51

George. He tells George that he’s going to leave town, as he
can’t stand the thought of Andreson lying in his room,
waiting to be killed. George tells him not to think about it.

A Bright Boy

The Killers is based on Hemingway’s 1927 short story. It was
Tarkovsky’s idea to adapt the story (Hemingway’s collected
works having just been published for the first time in the
Soviet Union) and marks the first time that VGIK students
were allowed to adapt a foreign work. The film was shot
largely on just one set at Romm’s insistence.

There are a few traces of what would become Tarkovsky’s

mature style: the action is frequently covered in wide shots;
characters are filmed from behind (such as the opening
tracking shot of Al and Max walking to the bar and the event
around which the story is built – Andreson’s murder –
happens not only off-screen but, we assume, after the film has
ended. However, it should be noted that although Tarkovsky
would later employ off-screen events in films such as Ivan’s
Childhood and Solaris, here it is more a case of being faithful
to Hemingway’s story, which ends as the film does. In fact,
The Killers is Tarkovsky’s most faithful adaptation of a literary
work. (One could easily imagine Vladimir Bogomolov,
Stanislav Lem and the Strugatsky brothers being quite
envious of the respect with which Tarkovsky treated
Hemingway’s work.) The general mood of bleakness and
tension as the characters wait for Andreson to arrive at the
café foreshadows in embryonic form Tarkovsky’s mature
work, which frequently takes place in a time of crisis or
apocalypse.

Stand-out moments include the visits of the three

customers, especially Tarkovsky’s own cameo as the second

S E A N M A RT I N

5 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 52

customer.The gangsters get ready to shoot, believing him to
be Andreson, but when they realise he is not, they wait on
tenterhooks for Tarkovsky’s character to leave. His noncha-
lant whistling ‘Lullaby of Birdland’

adds much to the

tension of the scene.Vadim Novikov as the baby-faced killer
Max is also particularly memorable.

Alexander Gordon, who co-directed the film with

Tarkovsky and Marika Beiku, noted that although he
(Gordon) directed the scene in which Nick visits Andreson
(played by fellow student Vassily Shukshin

), Tarkovsky and

Beiku handled the rest of the action, but ‘Andrei was defi-
nitely in charge’.

The Killers is an effective piece, moodily

lit and tightly edited. ‘Romm praised the film,’ Gordon
noted. ‘And our fellow students like it too.’

There Will Be No Leave Today (1959)

Alternate Title(s):

None

Russian Title:

Segodnya Uvolneyiha Ne Budet

Production Company:

VGIK/Russian Television

Directors:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Gordon

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Gordon, based on

a story by I Makhov
Directors of Photography:

Lev Bunin, Ernst Yakovlev

Music:

Y Matskevicha

Art Director:

S Peterson

Sound:

Oleg Polisonov

Cast:

Oleg Borisov, A Alexiev, Pyotr Lyubeshkin, Oleg

Mokshantsev, Vladimir Marenkov, Igor Kosukhin, Leonid
Kuravlyov, Stanislav Lyubshin, Alexei Smirnov, Nina
Golovina, Alexei Dobronravov
Running Time:

45 mins

First Screening:

April 1959 (Soviet Television)

5 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 53

Storyline

On a building site in a Russian town,

a workman acciden-

tally uncovers a cache of bombs from the Great Patriotic
War. Army inspectors arrive, and discover that the cache is
larger than previously thought. Army practice dictates that
old arsenals should be destroyed on-site by detonation, but
they realise that this one is much too big and detonating it
could endanger local residents. The inspectors have no
option but to order an evacuation.

In a big set piece, the town is evacuated: people leave by

bus, bike and cart. The soldiers then carefully move the
bombs onto a truck and the whole cache is taken out of
town.

One of the bombs looks as though it might explode, so a

soldier quickly removes it from the truck. He carries it safely
away from the cache before it explodes. For a moment we
think he may have been killed in the blast, until he emerges
blackened and tattered from the smoke.

The town is repopulated to the strains of stirring Soviet

music. The army are treated as heroes as they are reunited
with their girlfriends.

Production History

There has long been misunderstanding about There Will Be
No Leave Today. Mark Le Fanu notes that the film is about
the head of a geological expedition waiting on a foggy pier
for some papers to be delivered to him, and describes it as
‘really only a mood piece’

that clearly makes reference to

Tarkovsky’s time in Siberia. In fact, what Le Fanu is
describing is ‘a short study’, as Maya Turovskaya describes
it,

called The Concentrate (aka Extract). From what both

S E A N M A RT I N

5 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 54

writers say of the piece, it would appear that they had actu-
ally seen the film, but Tarkovsky’s sister Marina confirmed in
an interview that the ‘short study’ was actually a short story
that was not filmed by Tarkovsky while he was at VGIK.

Co-directed with Gordon, There Will Be No Leave Today

was a joint production between VGIK and Russian television
(which aired it in April 1959).

It is an altogether more

ambitious film than The Killers, although, like its predecessor,
it bears few discernible Tarkovskian fingerprints. It is impor-
tant mainly for being Tarkovsky’s first film to use professional
actors – principally the male lead, Oleg Borisov – and for
being his first opportunity to shoot on a larger scale than The
Killers (the evacuation scene being the film’s largest set
piece). But as Alexander Gordon admits, ‘We just chose an
easy, uncomplicated script.We did not set out to do a master-
piece, our focus was on learning the elementaries of film-
making’.

Perhaps Leave’s most important function was to

serve in just this capacity, that of an invaluable learning tool.
Moreover, the film, dealing as it does with the Great Patriotic
War (or at least an aspect of its aftermath), would serve as an
unwitting dry run for Ivan’s Childhood.

The Steamroller and the Violin (1960)

Alternate Title(s):

The Skating Rink and the Violin

Russian Title:

Katok I Skripka

Production Company:

Mosfilm (Children’s Film Unit)

Production Supervisor:

A Karetin

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Andrei Mikhalkov-

Konchalovsky, S Bakhmetyeva (story)
Director of Photography:

Vadim Yusov

Assistant Director:

O Gerts

5 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 55

Editor:

Lyubov Butuzova

Music:

Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Musical Direction:

Emil Kachaturian

Art Director:

Savet Agoyan

Costume:

A Martinson

Make-Up:

Anna Makasheva

Special Effects:

B Pluzhnikov, Albert Rudachenko, V

Sevostyanov
Sound:

Vladimir Krachkovsky

Cast:

Igor Fomchenko (Sasha),Vladimir Zamansky (Sergei),

Natalya Arkhangelskaya (Girl), Marina Adzhubei (Mother),
Yura Brusev, Slava Borisev, Sasha Vitoslavsky, Sasha Ilin, Kolya
Kozarev, Zhenya Klyachkovsky, Igor Kolovikov, Zhenya
Fedochenko, Tanya Prokhorova, Antonina Maximova,
Ludmila Semyonova, G Zhdanova, M Figner
Running Time:

46 mins

First Screening:

Moscow, 1960

First Screening in West:

New York Student Film Festival,

1961
Release in West:

2002 (DVD release)

Awards:

Best Film, New York Student Film Festival 1961

Storyline

Sasha leaves the flat he shares with his mother to attend his
violin lesson. A gang of kids tease him as he exits the
building. Sergei, a steamroller driver working nearby, comes
to Sasha’s rescue.

Walking to his lesson, Sasha pauses in front of a shop

window. City scenes are reflected in its prism-like windows.

Sasha waits outside the music room. He leaves an apple for

a little girl who is also waiting. He goes into his lesson after
a little boy emerges in tears from the music room. The

S E A N M A RT I N

5 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 56

teacher is strict with Sasha, reprimanding him for having too
much imagination. Sasha leaves, not noticing that the girl has
eaten the apple.

At the building site, a female steamroller driver flirts with

Sergei. Sasha, returning home, helps Sergei with some repairs
to his steamroller. Sergei gives Sasha a ride on the steam-
roller, letting him drive it.The gang, watching, are envious.

On their way to lunch, Sasha and Sergei pass a boy who

is being bullied. Sasha intervenes and restores the boy’s ball
to him at the cost of receiving a beating himself.

The gang sneak a look at Sasha’s violin, which he has left

on the steamroller, but decide to leave it alone.

Sasha objects when Sergei calls him a ‘musician’ and not a

‘worker’.They watch a building being demolished. During a
sudden downpour, they become separated.

Over lunch, Sasha plays for Sergei.They arrange to go to

the cinema that night. Sasha practises at home, but his
mother won’t let him go out. Sergei’s female colleague finds
him waiting at the cinema. With no sign of Sasha, he goes
into the cinema with her.

In a dream, Sasha is reunited with Sergei on the asphalt.

Tarkovsky’s Calling Card

Tarkovsky’s diploma film for VGIK, The Steamroller and the
Violin (1960), was his first film as sole director. It sets the
agenda for what would make his work ‘Tarkovskian’ in a way
that The Killers and There Will Be No Leave Today did not.The
film contains visual motifs that he would later make his own,
and, in foreshadowing much of his later practice, also contains
plot elements that are directly taken from his own life.
Steamroller also anticipates the aesthetic that he would develop
in numerous articles and interviews before it achieved its final

5 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 57

written form in his book, Sculpting in Time. Tarkovsky was
clearly ambitious with the film: it was twice as long as the
average VGIK short, running at 46 minutes, and it was in
colour. Although the film marks the beginning of his collab-
oration with cameraman Vadim Yusov, that was largely due to
the fact that Tarkovsky failed to get star cinematographer
Sergei Urusevsky, who had shot Kalatozov’s The Cranes are
Flying. Steamroller also sees the start of Tarkovsky’s collabora-
tions with composer Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, musical
director Emil Kachaturian and special effects artist V
Sevostyanov.

In choosing to make a film seen through the eyes of a

young boy,Tarkovsky was conforming to standard VGIK prac-
tice of the time. Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s and Yuli
Fait’s diploma films (The Boy and the Dove and Streetcar to Other
Cities, respectively) were also films about children. Stylistically,
the film contains flashy sequences that were clearly meant to
demonstrate Tarkovsky’s ability but which he would never use
again, such as the scene in which Sasha stops outside the shop
window and looks at the reflections in the various mirrors on
display. A kaleidoscope of city scenes is shown: trams; build-
ings; a woman dropping a bag of apples (foreshadowing the
apples spilling from the lorry on the beach in Ivan’s Childhood);
a balloon seller (a possible reference to Albert Lamorisse’s
hugely popular 1956 short, The Red Balloon); a little boy with
his toy boat; and a clock face.The final shot, of a flock of birds
taking off, is perhaps the only Tarkovskian element of the
whole sequence. Similarly, although Sasha’s final imagining of
his meeting with Sergei prefigures the later imagined or
dreamt endings of Ivan’s Childhood, Solaris, Mirror and Nostalgia,
we are taken into the sequence by the conventional device of
a dissolve and a lush string arrangement on the soundtrack.
The handling of the space of the stairwell is likewise fairly

S E A N M A RT I N

5 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 58

ordinary, with the camera seeming to follow an invisible Sasha
out of the building.

However, the film does contain a number of other

elements that are much more in keeping with what would
become Tarkovsky’s mature style. Water is perhaps the most
obvious, appearing in the film in a glass, as a sudden down-
pour, puddles, a river and a running tap. Mirrors are used
three times: the shop window scene and twice at Sasha’s
home, where we see his mother reflected in one as she forbids
him to go and meet Sergei, and then at the end, when Sasha
looks at his own reflection, imagining meeting Sergei. In
what is perhaps the most visually Tarkovskian scene, when
Sasha plays his violin for Sergei, light reflected in puddles
plays on the walls around them, anticipating the use of the
same technique in Nostalgia by more than two decades. The
film is also notable for the performances from the children,
especially Igor Fomchenko as Sasha.Tarkovsky was a sensitive
director of children, possibly because he was said to have had
an essentially childlike nature himself, and he maintained that
children always understood his films.

On a thematic level, the film’s depiction of the power

of art (maybe Sasha is surprised at his own playing for Sergei)
and the artist as someone set apart from society harks back
more to the nineteenth-century literary tradition of
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy rather than to contemporary Soviet
ideology. Tarkovsky would pursue these ideas both in later
films – Rublev, Gorchakov and Alexander are all men of arts
and letters – and in his thinking. Even a cursory reading of
Sculpting in Time shows the extent to which Tarkovsky saw
himself as part of this tradition: ‘Film-making, like any other
artistic authorship, has to be subject first and foremost to inner
demands.’

[emphasis added] These ‘inner demands’ are

present in Steamroller – if only in sketch form – and would

5 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 59

not only shape Tarkovsky’s subsequent films, but also the way
in which he would call for a new type of image, a new type
of film, which would respect its audience by showing them
as little as possible.

In this way,Tarkovsky hoped to stimu-

late the viewer into ‘filling in the gaps’ using their own expe-
rience effectively to ‘complete’ his films.

Autobiographical Elements

Direct autobiography appears in the guise of Sasha having
music lessons:Tarkovsky himself had music lessons for seven
years when he was a boy.The role of the adults in the film is
likewise autobiographical. Sasha’s mother is remote, being
mainly shown reflected in a mirror, and then only briefly,
perhaps echoing the reported aloofness of Tarkovsky’s own
mother. Maria Ivanovna’s concern for her wayward son is
spoken by the stern music teacher:

‘You’ve got too much

imagination.What’ll we do with you?’

But if Sasha’s mother is remote, then his father is even

more so: he does not appear on-screen at any time, nor is
mention made of him in the film. In his place is the steam-
roller driver, Sergei, whom Sasha looks up to after Sergei
saves him from being bullied by the gang of kids who live in
Sasha’s building. That the relationship between the artist
(Sasha) and the artisan (Sergei) is conventionally Soviet
would no doubt have played a part in Tarkovsky achieving
full marks upon graduation from VGIK (the film’s most
obviously ‘Soviet’ shot is the demolition of the old house to
reveal the white tower block behind), but Sergei is undoubt-
edly a stand-in for Arseny, and the fact that Sasha’s planned
outing to the cinema with him is thwarted by his mother is
perhaps an indication of the ambivalence Tarkovsky felt
towards his own mother.

S E A N M A RT I N

6 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 60

Ivan’s Childhood (1962)

I S T O RY

Alternate Title:

My Name is Ivan (US title)

Russian Title:

Ivanovo Detstvo

Production Company:

Mosfilm

Production Supervisor:

G Kuznetsov

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Mikhail Papava, Vladimir Bogomolov (and

Andrei Tarkovsky & Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky,
uncredited) based on Bogomolov’s novella Ivan.
Director of Photography:

Vadim Yusov

Editor:

Georgi Natanson

Music:

Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Musical Direction:

Emil Kachaturian

Art Director:

Evgeny Chernyaev

Special Effects:

V Sevostyanov, S Mukhin

Military Adviser:

G Goncharov

Sound:

Inna Zelentsova

Cast:

Nikolai Burlyaev (Ivan), Valentin Zubkov (Capt

Kholin), Evgeny Zharikov (Lt Galtsev), Stepan Krylov (Cpl
Katasonych),V Malyavina (Masha), Nikolai Grinko (Lt-Col
Gryaznov), D Milyutenko (Old man with hen), Irina
Tarkovskaya (Ivan’s Mother),

Andrei Mikhalkov-

Konchalovsky (Soldier with spectacles), Ivan Savkin,

6 1

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 61

Vladimir Marenkov,Vera Miturich
Shot:

Autumn/Winter 1961

Running Time:

95 mins

First Screening:

Moscow 30 January 1962 (Rough

cut)/March 1962 (Finished)
USSR Release:

1962

First Screening in West:

Venice Film Festival, September

1962
Release in West:

1963

Awards:

Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival 1962; Best

Director, San Francisco Film Festival 1962

Storyline

A rural idyll shows 12-year-old Ivan delighting in nature
and flying over it. He tells his mother that he has heard a
cuckoo. A sudden burst of gunfire. Ivan wakes up; we realise
what we have just seen is a dream. Ivan leaves the old wind-
mill where he has been hiding and makes his way across a
barren landscape. The credits roll over him wading across a
river.

Ivan reports to a military outpost. Lt Galtsev refuses to

believe that Ivan is an agent. A phone call, though, confirms
that Ivan is a Russian agent (he is a scout). Ivan writes his
report, and then sleeps.

Dream #2: Ivan and his mother are looking down a well.

Ivan then appears to be at the bottom of the well. Ivan’s
mother is killed.

Ivan wakes to greet Capt Kholin, who is a sort of father

figure to him.They go to their HQ, where Lt-Col Gryaznov
tells Ivan he wants to send him to military school. Ivan
threatens to run away.

Ivan talks to a deranged old man in the ruins of the man’s

S E A N M A RT I N

6 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 62

house. He has lost his wife at the hands of the Nazis.
Gryaznov arrives and takes Ivan away.

Galtsev chides Masha, a young nurse, witnessed by

Kholin. Kholin tries to woo Masha in a birch grove. Masha
returns to Galtsev.

Kholin and Cpl Katasonych plot to retrieve the bodies of

two scouts who have been executed by the Nazis and left on
the other side of the river. Galtsev needles Kholin over his
interest in Masha.

Ivan studies a reproduction of Dürer’s The Four Horsemen

of the Apocalypse, and tells Galtsev that the figure of Death
reminds him of a German he saw, and also that Germans
can’t have writers, because they burn books.

Galtsev, Kholin and Katasonych discuss how to retrieve

the bodies of the scouts. They listen to an old Chaliapin
record, ‘Masha May Not Cross the River’.

The men select a boat for the expedition and discuss the

possibility that one of them adopt Ivan. We learn that Ivan’s
mother and sister were killed by the Nazis and that his father
died in military service.

In a dream-like waking sequence, Ivan acts out a fantasy

of killing Germans. Galtsev again tries to persuade Ivan to
attend military academy, but Ivan rejects the idea.

Dream #3: Ivan and a little girl (who may be his dead

sister) are on a truck laden with apples. He offers the girl an
apple. She refuses. The truck drives onto a beach, spilling
apples in its wake. Horses eat the apples off the sand.

Kholin and Galtsev set off with Ivan in a canoe, after

learning that Katasonych has been killed.They drop Ivan off
to start his next mission, then collect the bodies of the two
scouts.

Kholin listens to the Chaliapin record again. Masha appears

for the last time. Galtsev tells her he is sending her away.

6 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 63

Newsreel footage of the Soviet army in Berlin, 1945. We

see the burnt bodies of Goebbels and his wife, and those of
their six young children; the Germans signing the instrument
of surrender; more dead Nazis and their families.

Galtsev is overseeing an operation to sort through Nazi

paperwork. He imagines a conversation with Kholin, who
has been killed offscreen. Galtsev discovers Ivan’s file: it
confirms that Ivan was captured and executed.

Dream #4: Ivan and his friends are playing hide and seek

on a beach. Ivan’s mother watches over them. Ivan races his
sister towards a dead tree. As Ivan reaches the tree, the screen
fades to black.

Production History

Ivan’s Childhood, or Ivan as it was initially called, began
shooting in the autumn of 1960, under the direction of
Eduard Abalov, a director and actor of Tarkovsky’s genera-
tion. However, the material shot was deemed unsatisfactory
and the production had closed down by the end of the year.
Abalov’s footage was written off, with Mosfilm seeking a
new director. On 16 June 1961,Tarkovsky was confirmed as
the new director; he was asked to submit his shooting script
by the end of the month.

Although he was allowed to choose his cameraman

(Yusov) and also his young star, Nikolai Burlyaev, Tarkovsky
inherited Abalov’s script, co-written by the original novella’s
author, Vladimir Bogomolov (1924–2003). Even while
Abalov had been working on the film, there had been
disagreements about the script; at one point, it even had a
happy ending, with Ivan surviving the war and getting
married. Bogomolov, who had himself been a scout during
the war, objected, and a more downbeat ending was written.

S E A N M A RT I N

6 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 64

Once Tarkovsky came on board, he immediately proposed
inserting the four dream sequences, which Bogomolov also
objected to, as he did the love-story element centring around
the character of the young nurse, Masha.

Shooting began in the autumn at Kanev, on the Dnieper,

where the events of the story really took place. Despite bad
weather, filming was completed by 18 January 1962.
Tarkovsky, as would become his practice, had begun editing
while shooting, and the first cut was screened at Mosfilm on
30 January 1962. He worked throughout the following
month on fine-tuning and, on 3 March, the film was
approved. Despite the fact that Bogomolov was still
protesting about the dream sequences and what he felt were
inconsistencies in the handling of military detail, Tarkovsky
received praise for bringing the film in 24,000 Roubles
under budget, and the film became something of a talking
point at a seminar called ‘The Language of Cinema’, held at
the Filmmakers’ Union later that month.

The film was first shown in the West at the Venice Film

Festival in September 1962, where it caused a sensation and
won the festival’s top honour, the Golden Lion (shared with
Valerio Zurlini’s Family Diary). Tarkovsky became famous
overnight. While the Italian Communist Party newspaper,
Unita, attacked the film for being petit bourgeois, no less a
figure than Jean-Paul Sartre championed the film, praising its
‘socialist surrealism’.

Back home,Tarkovsky fared less well.

As Evgeny Zharikov, who played Galtsev, recalls ‘In our
country, the film was shown on a limited basis [i.e. Category
2] because Khrushchev, on seeing it, said “We never used
children like that in the war.”And it was enough for the film
to be almost not mentioned, to be almost not shown, to be
hushed up in general. And the whole world ran it as a
masterpiece.’

6 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 65

A Qualifying Examination

Tarkovsky spoke of Ivan’s Childhood as his ‘qualifying exami-
nation’ to see ‘whether or not I had it in me to be a
director’.

While Tarkovsky’s mature style is not yet evident,

it contains numerous elements that would reappear in his
later films, and it would therefore be a mistake to see the film
as mere prentice work. After all, it won the Golden Lion at
Venice and launched his career overnight. It would be
instructive to examine the film in this light, to see what Ivan’s
Childhood contains that Tarkovsky later did and did not do.

Ivan’s Childhood is a war film in which we do not see any

fighting. This is not so much Tarkovsky trying to make a
revisionist film, but merely a reflection of Bogomolov’s orig-
inal story. Although we see the end of one mission at the
beginning of the film and the start of what will be Ivan’s last
mission at the end, the film is largely concerned with what
happens between missions, away from the Front Line. In
doing so, Tarkovsky is establishing a basic dramatic structure
which will recur in nearly all his subsequent work: Rublev,
if not waiting, exists in a world in which he cannot move
forward until a crisis or defining moment occurs (the casting
of the bell); Kelvin is largely shown not working (the
recording and sending of his encephalogram, two of Solaris’s
key plot points, happen offscreen); Alexander in The Sacrifice
says that he has felt as if he has been waiting for ‘this
moment’ (that is, nuclear war) all of his life.

The film’s central trio of characters – Ivan, Capt Kholin

and Lt Galtsev – is the first in a succession of such trios:
Rublev, Daniel, Kirill; Kelvin, Snaut, Sartorius; Stalker,
Professor, Writer. Like their later counterparts, the three
characters in Ivan spend the film wrestling with one major
theme, in this case, responsibility: Ivan feels that it is his duty

S E A N M A RT I N

6 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 66

to go back to the Front to continue his mission of
vengeance; Kholin feels protective towards the boy as if he
were his son (Katasonych and Gryaznov could also be said to
form a ‘fatherly’ trio with Kholin, as both of these characters,
while widely separated by rank, are also very close to Ivan);
while the young and inexperienced Galtsev has to deal with
not only what do to with Ivan, but also his feelings towards
the young doctor’s assistant, Masha, and his rivalry over her
with the older Kholin.

Both waiting and responsibility are inextricably linked to

the apocalyptic situation the characters find themselves in.As
if to underline this, we see Ivan studying a reproduction of
Dürer’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, noting that he
has seen a German on a motorcycle who looked like one of
the horsemen. Apocalypse – whether personal or public – is
one of Tarkovsky’s recurring themes, and an apocalyptic or
crisis state prevails to a greater or lesser degree in all of the
later films: the Mongol invasions in Rublev; Kelvin’s inability
to work when faced with his past in Solaris; Alexei’s apparent
recalling of key moments in his life on his deathbed in
Mirror; the general state of post-industrial and ecological
collapse in Stalker; Domenico’s incarceration of his family
and ultimate self-immolation in Nostalgia; and the outbreak
of nuclear war in The Sacrifice.

The end of the world is a theme closely linked to the idea

of the establishment of a new world, or a world redeemed.
In Ivan’s Childhood, the only way for Ivan to enter this new
world is by fighting to avenge the death of his parents; his
tragedy is that he has had no conventional childhood and can
have one only in dreams.

6 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 67

The Dream Sequences

The dream sequences were part of Tarkovsky’s conception of
the film from the very beginning.There are four of them in
the film and they serve not only to highlight Ivan’s – and
Russia’s – tragedy, but also to show that, even at this early
stage of his career, the world, for Tarkovsky, is simultaneously
‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (an idea most fully realised in his last film,
The Sacrifice).

The first dream shows Ivan running to tell his mother that

he has heard a cuckoo. The peaceful, light mood of the
dream is shattered by a burst of gunfire. The second shows
Ivan seemingly both at the top and then at the bottom of a
well, trying to catch a fallen star. The gunfire comes again,
but this time his mother is killed. The third dream shows
Ivan in the back of a lorry, offering an apple to a little girl of
about his own age. He offers her the apple twice and both
times she refuses.A sense of impending doom is suggested by
the use of a back-projection in negative,

and the little girl’s

ever more serious expression. This is immediately alleviated
– if only for a short time – when we see the lorry drive onto
a beach, spilling the apples, which grazing horses gladly eat.
Ivan and the girl are now smiling. The final dream shows
Ivan and his friends playing hide and seek on a beach, but
ends ominously with the camera floating into the blackness
of the dead tree.

The dreams are all cut against scenes that are generally

their opposite: from the joy and flight of the first dream,
Tarkovsky cuts to Ivan, resolutely earthbound and hiding in
a ruined windmill; the second dream, in which his mother
dies, follows a scene in which Ivan is shown sleeping
comfortably; the third dream, of the uneaten apples, is
preceded by a meal scene; while before the children’s games

S E A N M A RT I N

6 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 68

of the fourth dream, we see the bodies of Goebbels’ children
lying next to the charred corpses of their parents, and
Galtsev’s imagining Ivan being beheaded.

The dreams also employ devices that would recur in the

later films: flight (first dream); Ivan being shown in two logi-
cally incompatible spaces (being at the top and bottom of the
well); while the fourth dream raises the question of who the
dreamer is, as Ivan himself is dead by the time the dream
‘happens’ (a device later used in Mirror and Nostalgia). By
placing this dream in a logically ‘impossible’ place in the
narrative (logically impossible, that is, if we assume the
dreamer to be Ivan),Tarkovsky could be suggesting that it is
only in death that the contradictions and paradoxes of this
life are resolved.

Narrative, Stylistic and Visual Devices

Ivan’s Childhood contains few of the lengthy takes, tracking
shots and slow zooms that inform Tarkovsky’s mature style.
However, it does contain a number of Tarkovsky’s other
trademark devices that are worth noting here.

The pre-credits sequence is almost a calling card for the

mature style: Ivan walks out of frame left and the camera
begins to crane up the tree. Ivan is then seen re-entering
frame, again from the left, but this time in the middle
distance. (When Ivan leaves the windmill, Tarkovsky blocks
the scene in the same way: Ivan, on the horizon, walks out
of frame left, only to reappear frame left in the foreground a
few moments later.) Ivan is then shown rising up into the
trees, before flying down to meet his mother in order to tell
her that he has heard a cuckoo. Flight recurs, perhaps most
memorably in Solaris and Mirror, as does the figure of the
mother; the setting, too – a grove of trees – is something that

6 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 69

Tarkovsky would make his own. Trees are not his only
concern, however: just after Ivan has ‘landed’, the camera
tracks right across a rock face, betraying Tarkovsky’s interest
in natural surfaces and textures.The second dream is prefixed
by a similar shot, where the camera moves away from the
stove, over some logs towards a bowl of water.These shots are
too long to be seen as cutaways in the traditional sense;
rather, they could be seen as ‘necessary digressions’, the way
the characters themselves might do if they were pausing for
a moment to look around to gauge – or quietly celebrate –
the depth and mystery of the world around them.

Ivan’s first meeting with Galtsev in the field base likewise

bears a number of elements which show that Tarkovsky’s
mature style is already present, albeit in somewhat embryonic
form. The scene, while made up of short takes, is unusually
long, as if Tarkovsky were aiming to capture real time
flowing through the frame, an idea which was to become a
major preoccupation. For most of the scene, Ivan and Galtsev
do not face each other, except for moments of confronta-
tion, such as Ivan’s attempts to pick up the phone and call
HQ himself. Again, characters in the later films spend much
of their time facing away from each other, whether it is
Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek discussing the last
judgment in the birch wood or the three men in Stalker
bickering amid the puddles and grime of the Zone.

Another device that would become almost a fetish for

Tarkovsky was the filming of the head from behind, or from
an oblique angle, almost like a classical bust but in reverse.
Here, as Ivan begins to write his report, the angle is unusu-
ally flat, but the shot still serves the same purpose: it is as if
Tarkovsky is showing us that any aspect of the body, whether
in motion or at rest, can be worthy of scrutiny and its
uniqueness celebrated. As the camera dollies in to the back

S E A N M A RT I N

7 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 70

of Ivan’s head, he is busy arranging the seeds and leaves that
stand for the German positions, which, while important for
the story, take a secondary place at this moment, perhaps
suggesting that, for Tarkovsky, Ivan’s physical being, his frailty,
his boyishness, is as important as the troop movements. It
recalls the observation Tarkovsky would later make in
Sculpting in Time: ‘In terms of a person’s spiritual experience,
what happened to him yesterday may have exactly the same
degree of significance as what happened to humanity a thou-
sand years ago.’

Tarkovsky’s disregard for conventional plot is evident from

the way the story develops immediately after Ivan has written
his report and has been reunited with Kholin. We then see
Gryaznov on the phone, when Ivan bursts into his office to
protest that he is going to be sent to a military school on
Gryaznov’s orders and threatens to run away. Despite his
protests, Ivan appears to acquiesce. This scene is followed by
Ivan’s meeting with the old man with the hen, the first of
Tarkovsky’s Holy Fools. It is only when Gryaznov and Kholin
appear to collect Ivan do we realise that he has in fact run
away rather than be sent to the military school. Tarkovsky
would term this ‘retrospective understanding’, which is to say
that the scene only makes sense at its end.The device recurs
throughout the film in differing forms: the opening sequence
can only be identified as a dream once we see Ivan wake up
in the old windmill; after he’s been picked up by Gryaznov
and Kholin, Ivan mentions two soldiers called Lyakhov and
Moroz, but it is only much later in the film that we realise
that these are the two men whose bodies have been strung up
on the other side of the river, which Galtsev and Kholin
rescue at the end of the film; and, more simply, a handheld
sequence in the birch grove can be identified as Masha’s point
of view only when we see her at the end of the shot.

7 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 71

Likewise,Tarkovsky is never clear about precisely what the

final mission is: all we know is that Galtsev and Kholin take
Ivan across the river in order to retrieve the bodies of
Lyakhov and Moroz. The sequence is also further compli-
cated by shots of reflections of the trees in the water, that
would at first appear to be a POV shot from the canoe, but
the camera then cuts back, twice, to Galtsev, who is standing
by a tree, perhaps watching Ivan recede into the twilight,
perhaps deep in thought. Given that there is no logical
explanation or dramatic function for the reflection shots, it
may be that, for Tarkovsky, the reflections in the water are
just as important as the story. It could even be that Tarkovsky
is suggesting that the reflections are as transient as human life
and that nature is more permanent than we are.

Other trademarks dot the film: the door blowing open

and shut to reveal the old man with the hen seems to be
animate, moving of its own accord; Galtsev stumbling in the
trench while talking to Kholin; Galtsev castigating Masha in
the field hospital in a shot that follows him as he walks, then
picks up Masha, settles on her as Galtsev walks out of shot
only to follow him when he walks back in again, until it
picks up Kholin (who has just entered) and settles on him,
letting Galtsev leave frame once more; the scene in Berlin,
slightly reminiscent of Citizen Kane, as the Russians sift
through Nazi files; and ash raining down in silence as Galtsev
has a brief conversation with the dead Kholin.

Ivan’s Childhood contains, however, a number of elements

that would not recur in any later film: the severe, expression-
istic camera angles as Ivan leaves the windmill; the use of
back projection; the whip pan that introduces Masha and
Kholin in the birch grove; the hand-held sequences (in the
first dream, in the birch grove and at the end in the Nazi
archive in Berlin); the use of conventional scoring (such as in

S E A N M A RT I N

7 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 72

the scene where Masha wanders happily through the birch
grove to the accompaniment of lush strings).

To say that Ivan’s Childhood pre-empts Tarkovsky’s later

work in many respects is in no way to diminish the film. It
is a major achievement and, had it been Tarkovsky’s only
film, it would have earned him a place, however modest, in
the history of Russian cinema. There are many striking
moments that show Tarkovsky’s originality and mastery to be
already manifest: the dreams; Ivan playing at war; the auda-
cious use of graphic newsreel; and the tracking shots across
the surface of the river just after Ivan leaves Kholin and
Galtsev for the last time.

Like The Steamroller and the Violin before it, Ivan’s

Childhood is more a case of what Tarkovsky could do with
the camera and narrative technique, rather than what he
would do in later films.Tarkovsky later wrote in Sculpting in
Time that the completion of Ivan’s Childhood marked the end
of one particular phase in his life.While fêted internationally,
Tarkovsky remained something of a pariah at home, yet
nobody could have predicted the quantum leap he would
take with his next film, Andrei Rublev.

‘His situation is that of my generation.’

‘Were you in the war?’ Sasha asks Sergei at one point in The
Steamroller and the Violin. Sergei nods, but refuses to be drawn
further. Had he lived, Ivan would have been Sergei’s age and
the two characters share with Tarkovsky an approximate
birth-date in the early 1930s.Tarkovsky’s own experience of
the war of course differs from Ivan’s: he spent part of it as an
evacuee in Yurievets, and all of it waiting, not only for the war
to end, but for his father to come home. Arseny, of course,
never did come home permanently and Tarkovsky shares

7 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 73

with Ivan the sunlit dreams of childhood, before the war,
when the family – and happiness – was still complete. As
Natasha Synessios notes,‘true childhood was the time before
the war’.

Ivan’s Childhood cannot, of course, be viewed as

being entirely about some idyllic ‘lost time’ in the Proustian
sense; it is very much about the deprivations that Tarkovsky
and his generation suffered. Tarkovsky admitted as much: ‘I
am in love with the subject. I was his age when the war
began. His situation is that of my generation.’

The newsreel sequence at the end of the film speaks for

itself: not only is Ivan shown to have died at the hands of the
Nazis, but we also see the horror of the Nazis’ treatment of
their own direct families when we see Goebbels’ six children
lying dead next to the charred remains of their parents.
Direct autobiography appears when Ivan is told by Galtsev
that he is going to be sent to the Suvorov military academy
after the mission that opens the film, mainly, it seems, on the
humanitarian grounds of keeping Ivan alive. Galtsev there-
fore stands in for the protective father that Tarkovsky himself
never knew, although it is ironic that Galtsev is repeating a
threat that Tarkovsky’s father did actually make in order to
instil some discipline into his wayward son.The plan to send
the teenage Tarkovsky to Suvorov did not materialise, but, a
few years later, his time in Siberia seems to have instilled, if
not discipline into the 21-year-old Tarkovsky, then it
certainly succeeded in showing him what his destiny would
be.

Ivan’s Childhood represents Tarkovsky’s formative taiga year

better than any other of his films. Here we have the young
Tarkovsky for the first time able to utilise his experiences on
the River Kureika in Siberia, transforming them into
haunting images. Ivan’s Childhood is, like all of his subsequent
films, replete with water, but this film in particular is about a

S E A N M A RT I N

7 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 74

river: Ivan has just come back from crossing it at the begin-
ning, while the mission to retrieve the bodies of the two
Russian soldiers is likewise back across the same river. Before
the final mission across the river, the protagonists listen to an
old Chaliapin song, ‘Masha May not Cross the River’.
During Ivan’s final mission, we see, instead of the canoe that
bears him across the water, simply the reflection of the trees
above.The shot has no dramatic purpose; instead it serves to
remind either Ivan or, more likely, the viewer, that the world
of nature is unchanging and will survive when wars have
been forgotten, or that, in taking place outside of narrative
time, Tarkovsky seeks to remind us in this shot that what is
important is beyond not only narrative time but also beyond
historical time and event as well (war in this case).The calm
of the reflective water could represent either Tarkovsky’s own
memories of the River Kureika, or suggest that human expe-
rience is transitory and will one day be forgotten. The
opening line of dialogue, ‘Mother’s there’s a cuckoo!’,
however, comes not from Tarkovsky’s time in Siberia, but is
one of his earliest memories.

7 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 75

Andrei Rublev (1966/69)

I S T O RY

I I

Original Title:

The Passion According to Andrei (title of orig-

inal 205-minute cut)
Production Company:

Mosfilm

Production Manager:

Tamara Ogorodnikova

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Andrei Mikhalkov-

Konchalovsky
Director of Photography:

Vadim Yusov

Editors:

Ludmila Feiginova, O Shevkunenko, Tatyana

Yegorycheva
Music:

Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

Art Directors:

Evgeny Chernyaev, Ippolit Novoder-

yozhkin, Sergei Voronkov
Assistant Director:

Igor Petrov

Special Effects:

V Sevostyanov

Costumes:

Lidiya Novi, Maya Abar-Baranovskaya

Make-Up:

Vera Rudina, M Aliautdinov, S Barsukov

Sound:

Inna Zelentsova

Cast:

Anatoly Solonitsyn (Andrei Rublev), Ivan Lapikov

(Kirill), Nikolai Grinko (Daniel the Black), Nikolai Sergeyev
(Theophanes the Greek), Irina Tarkovskaya (Darotchka, the

7 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 76

Holy Fool), Nikolai Burlyaev (Boriska), Rolan Bykov
(Jester), Yuri Nikulin (Patrikey), Mikhail Kononov (Foma),
Yuri Nazarov (Grand Duke/His Brother), Stepan Krylov
(Bell-founder), Sos Sarkissian (Christ), Bolot Eishelanev
(Tartar Chief), Nikolai Glazkov (Efim the balloonist/man in
hut/man on horseback), Tamara Ogorodnikova (Mary the
Mother of Christ), I Miroshnichenko (Mary Magdalene), N
Snegina (Marfa), N Grabbe, B Beishenaliev, B Matisik, A
Obukhov,Volodya Titov
Shot:

April–November 1965, April-May 1966

Running Time:

185 mins (original cut, The Passion

According to Andrei, ran 205 mins); first Western prints ran 145
mins
First Screenings:

Moscow, December 1966

(190-minute version)

Moscow, February 1969

(185-minute version)

Moscow, April 1988

(205-minute version)

USSR Release:

December 1971

First Screening in West:

Cannes Film Festival, May 1969

Release in West:

1973 (one print ran in Paris during

1969/70)
Awards:

FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes 1969; French Film

Critics Association Prize 1969

Storyline

Shots, sequences or titles that occur only in the 205-minute version
are placed within square brackets […].

The opening credits play against the white wall of a

monastery. A bell tolls. [The credits play over a black screen.]

A balloonist takes off from a church tower, despite the

7 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 77

efforts of an angry mob that tries to stop him. He sails over
the waterlogged landscape, elated to be flying. The balloon
(made of animal skins) suddenly loses height and he plum-
mets to his death.

Part One: Episode 1, ‘The Jester’ (aka ‘The Buffoon’,

‘The Mummers’), [Summer] 1400

[The monks, Andrei Rublev, Kirill and Daniel the Black,
leave the Trinity Monastery to seek work as icon painters in
Moscow.] They cross a field and are caught in a sudden
downpour. They take shelter in a hut, where a jester per-
forms a bawdy song. The Duke’s men suddenly arrive and
take the jester away.The monks leave.

Episode 2, ‘Theophanes the Greek’, [Summer–Winter–

Spring–Summer] 1405[–1406]

Kirill visits Theophanes in Moscow. Theophanes asks Kirill
if he is Andrei Rublev. Kirill says that he knows Rublev, but
criticises the younger monk’s work. Theophanes asks Kirill
to help him paint the Church of the Annunciation (also in
Moscow). Kirill replies that he will accept only if
Theophanes summons him in front of Rublev and the
other monks.Theophanes goes outside to watch an execu-
tion.

At the Andronikov Monastery (where the three monks

are now living), Kirill is in his cell. A voice-over (by Kirill?)
reads from Ecclesiastes XII when the young apprentice Foma
rushes in to tell him that the Duke’s messenger has arrived.
He goes out to find that it is Rublev, and not himself, who
has been summoned to work in Moscow. [In the 205-minute
cut, these two sequences are reversed.] Kirill is ordered to

S E A N M A RT I N

7 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 78

leave the monastery. He storms off, beating his dog to death
when it tries to follow him.

Episode 3, ‘The Passion According to Andrei’, 1406

[In the 205-minute cut, this is not a separate episode, but the
second half of Episode 2.] Rublev and Foma are walking in
the woods. Rublev castigates his pupil for laziness and
untruthfulness.Theophanes, sitting nearby with his feet in an
anthill, also condemns the boy, and then argues with Rublev.
Rublev thinks that people are worthy of mercy, but
Theophanes is dismissive, stressing that time is cyclical and
that if Christ were to return, he would be crucified a second
time. There then follows the ‘Russian Calvary’ sequence, in
which the Russian Christ is crucified in a snowy winter
landscape. Rublev’s voice-over speaks of the sufferings of the
Russian people.

Episode 4 [3], ‘The Holiday’ (aka The Celebration),

[Spring] 1408

Andrei, Daniel, Foma and their group are en route to
Vladimir. Making camp on a riverbank, Andrei wanders into
the woods and inadvertently witnesses a pagan festival. He is
captured and tied up in a mock crucifixion, but a pagan girl
releases him. She kisses him and he tries to flee. The
following morning, Rublev returns to the camp, claiming
that he got lost in the forest. The Duke’s men chase some
pagans out of the woods, including the woman who freed
Andrei. She escapes from the men and swims across the river.
Rublev averts his gaze from her.

7 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 79

Episode 5 [4], ‘The Last Judgment’, [Summer] 1408

Rublev’s team are now in the cathedral at Vladimir, but no
work has started. Out in the fields, Rublev tells Daniel that
he can’t paint The Last Judgment, as he doesn’t want to
frighten people. Back in the cathedral, Rublev admits he
doesn’t know what to do. Foma announces that he is quit-
ting to work elsewhere.A dreamlike flashback shows Rublev
at the Duke’s new palace, as a voice-over recites 1
Corinthians 13. As he plays with the Duke’s small daughter,
a group of stonemasons quit to work for the Duke’s brother.
A party of the Duke’s men catches up with them in a wood
and blinds them all, except for the young boy, Sergei, who is
also part of Rublev’s team.We cut back to the cathedral, with
Rublev hurling paint against a wall. He commands Sergei to
read from the scriptures, and, as Sergei does so (Corinthians
again, this time Chapter 11:3–9), a mad woman enters the
cathedral, taking shelter from the rain. She becomes upset at
the smear of paint on the wall. Rublev takes pity on her and
declares that he will make his Last Judgment ‘a feast’. He
walks out into the rain.The girl follows him while Rublev’s
team look on.

Part Two: Episode 6 [5], ‘The Raid’, [Autumn] 1408

The Duke’s younger brother joins forces with a Tartar army;
together, they sack Vladimir. A series of flashbacks reveals the
Duke’s relationship with his twin brother. Rublev and the
idiot girl are taking refuge in the, by now, fully decorated
cathedral. The hordes break in, but Rublev saves the girl
from being raped by killing her attacker with an axe.

In the subsequent desolation of the cathedral, Rublev, in

a dreamlike scene, talks to Theophanes, who is now dead.

S E A N M A RT I N

8 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 80

Rublev tells him he will give up both painting as a protest
against the evil of the times and speech to atone for his crime
of murder. Snow begins to fall through the ruined roof of the
cathedral.

Episode 7, ‘The Silence’ [6 The Charity/Love], [Winter]

1412

Rublev and the idiot girl are at the Andronikov Monastery
outside Moscow. The Tartars arrive. They take the girl away,
to Rublev’s mute protests.

Kirill reappears, now blind, begging to be readmitted to

the fold. The abbot agrees (they already appear to be shel-
tering some of the blind stonemasons), but charges Kirill
with the task of writing out the scriptures 15 times.

Episode 8 [7], ‘The Bell’, [Spring–Summer–Autumn–

Winter–Spring] 1423–4

The Duke’s men enquire after the bell-caster by asking his
son, Boriska. Boriska replies that his father is dead and that
only he now knows the secret of bell-casting. The duke’s
men decide to take Boriska with them. Boriska starts work
with a team of initially reluctant older workers, embarking
on a long search for the right kind of clay.

The mute Rublev observes Boriska and his team at work.

The jester reappears, and accuses Rublev of betraying him to
the Duke’s men back in 1400. Kirill intervenes, later
confessing to Rublev that it was he who had betrayed the
jester and that he had always been jealous of Rublev’s talent.

The bell is unveiled before the Duke and his entourage

and is rung triumphantly. The idiot girl reappears, leading a
horse. She is now sane and well-dressed. Boriska confesses to

8 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 81

Rublev that he never knew the secret of bell-casting. Rublev
finally breaks his vow of silence to console Boriska and tells
him

that the two of them will work together, with Rublev

painting icons and Boriska casting bells.

Epilogue

The film cuts to colour, showing a series of close-ups of
Rublev’s icons.The paintings shown are details of The Trinity,
The Transfiguration, The Entry into Jerusalem, The Nativity, The
Raising of Lazarus, The Baptism of Christ, The Annunciation and
The Saviour in the Wood. Finally, we see four horses [in
colour], grazing in a meadow in the rain.

Production History

The Soviet Union celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary
of the birth of the great icon painter and national hero,
Andrei Rublev, in 1960.

Tarkovsky apparently got the idea

to make Andrei Rublev from his friend, the actor Vasily
Livanov, who saw himself in the title role.Tarkovsky drew up
a proposal with Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and
submitted it in 1961, before he started work on Ivan’s
Childhood. Due to other commitments, Livanov did not
become involved in the project (which he later regretted),

but Tarkovsky pursued it doggedly, even when there was
pressure on him after the success of Ivan’s Childhood to make
something else (in particular a film based on Leonid
Leonov’s 1961 story The Escape of Mr McKinley).

A contract was signed for Andrei Rublev in 1962, the treat-

ment approved in December 1963 and the script published
in the official film journal, Iskusstvo Kino, over two issues in
1964. This step was taken apparently in the name of drum-

S E A N M A RT I N

8 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 82

ming up support for a project that was already proving to be
controversial. It was debated not only at Mosfilm and
Goskino, but also among historians, academics, ordinary
readers and party apparatchiks.The ploy certainly seemed to
have helped, as the project was given the go-ahead in June,
with pre-production beginning in September.

Tarkovsky was forced to drop a number of key scenes, as

he had not been given enough money (the budget was
around one million Roubles). The main casualties were: an
opening scene depicting the Battle of Kulikovo, the first
major Russian defeat of the Tartars in 1380; an episode called
‘The Hunt’, in which the Grand Duke’s younger brother
goes on a swan-killing spree (one of the dead swans does
appear in the film, discovered by Foma in the birch wood); a
flashback to the Tartar siege of Moscow, in which the women
sacrificed their long hair; and the ‘Famine’ episode, which
was to show the Holy Fool regaining her wits after giving
birth to her child by the Tartar chieftain.

The film was shot between April and November 1965, at

which point bad weather forced the film to close down.The
remaining scenes were shot in April and May of 1966.
Despite the large scale of the film, the shoot ran smoothly,
with a number of reports attesting to the good atmosphere on
set. The film was ready by August, when permission for its
release, known as the akt, was signed. At this stage, it was
known as The Passion According to Andrei, and ran 205 minutes.

This is where the film’s troubles really began. For some

reason, the official film industry premiere did not happen
immediately. The delay may well have been caused by a
number of people objecting to the film’s length, its graphic
cruelty and the somewhat nebulous charge of ‘naturalism’.
By November, Tarkovsky had shortened the film by 15
minutes and it was presumably this 190-minute version that

8 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 83

was screened at Dom Kino in December 1966. ‘Never had
such a teeming, complex, crowded panorama of medieval
Russian life been seen on Soviet screens’, wrote the critic
Maya Turovskaya. She also noted that the audience was
‘stunned’ by the film.

Nevertheless, there were still calls for

further cuts, but Tarkovsky refused to make the film any
shorter. He also complained to Romanov, the head of
Goskino, that he had still not received the akt for the film’s
release, despite the fact that it had been signed.The film was
unofficially shelved, with no one on either side prepared to
make any further compromises.

Word that Tarkovsky was working on another film had

leaked out into the West.The selection committee of the Venice
Film Festival, where Ivan’s Childhood had been screened,
wanted the film for the 1966 Festival. A request was made to
Goskino, but the committee was told that the film had not yet
been finished, which at that time (March 1966) was true.The
following year, both Cannes and Venice tried to get the film,
but were told variously that it was still not finished, or that
there were ‘technical difficulties’. The 1968 Cannes Film
Festival was cancelled midway through due to the state of near
revolution that France was undergoing at the time, and Venice
seems to have thrown in the towel. Despite these setbacks, an
embarrassing bureaucratic blunder resulted in the film being
sold to a Western distribution company representing
Columbia, which had the rights to sell it in no fewer than 22
territories outside of the Soviet Union. Cannes tried to get the
film again in 1969, this time with the backing of the French
Communist Party. Goskino agreed to their request, provided
that Rublev was shown out of competition, in the last possible
screening slot, after all the awards had been given.

1969 proved to be the year of not one, but two premieres

for Andrei Rublev, and even more turmoil.A second Moscow

S E A N M A RT I N

8 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 84

premiere was held in February, the print now running at 185
minutes (although it remains uncertain as to when exactly
Tarkovsky made these further cuts). It would appear that
Goskino was coming round to grudgingly accepting the film
at last, and may have been preparing to release it as quietly as
possible. However, when the film was screened at Cannes, at
4a.m. on the last day of the festival, it was immediately
awarded the FIPRESCI (International Critics’) Prize, the
one award that had not yet been awarded. It was Venice all
over again: Tarkovsky had caused another sensation. The
Soviet authorities hit the roof.

All plans to release the film quietly and then bury it were

now impossible.The film was publicly shown at the Moscow
Film Festival in July, where Brezhnev showed his displeasure
by walking out halfway through. Goskino pressured
Columbia into not releasing the film, which the company
agreed to temporarily, and it seems that the film might never
have been released at all, were it not for one cinema in Paris,
which held on to its print despite visits from KGB agents,
who tried cloak and dagger tactics to retrieve it.

The film ran in Paris all through 1970; news of the film’s

already high reputation quickly spread. French critics named
it their Film of the Year, while Ingmar Bergman called it the
best film he had ever seen.

The film was eventually released

– in its 185-minute version – in the Soviet Union in
December 1971. In the West, it was cut even further (by
distributors, not Tarkovsky), finally appearing in 1973, a full
12 years after Tarkovsky began work on it.

‘A Startling, Uncanny Beauty’

Little is known for definite about the life of the historical
Andrei Rublev (c.1370–1430). During the 1390s, he was

8 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 85

thought to have been at the Trinity Monastery, just outside
Moscow. During his time as a monk there, he helped to
decorate the Cathedral of the Dormition in Zvenigorod. By
1400, he was at the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow. In
1405, he decorated the Cathedral of the Annunciation there
together with Theophanes the Greek. 1408 saw Rublev in
Vladimir, where he decorated the Cathedral of the
Dormition. For the last 20 or so years of his life he was back
at the Andronikov Monastery, although he did return at
some point to the Holy Trinity Monastery to paint his most
famous work, The Old Testament Trinity.

Given this paucity of material, Tarkovsky and his co-

writer, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, opted to create
largely imagined episodes in Rublev’s life that not only dealt
with the role of the artist, but, given that the film takes place
in a formative time for Russia, the film is also, to some
extent, a Russian Birth of a Nation. Rublev’s lifetime saw the
first stirrings of Russian reunification after nearly 200 years
of Tartar domination. Their hold was broken when the
Muscovite Grand Duke Dmitri Donskoi defeated the Tartars
at the Battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380. While the Tartars
could still be found laying siege to Moscow as late as 1571,
they would never again be in a position to dominate the
Russian people to the extent that they had. The tide had
turned and the work started by Donskoi would be
completed by his great successors, Ivan III, the first Tsar (aka
Ivan the Great) (1462–1505) and Ivan IV (the Terrible)
(1533–84).

Andrei Rublev marks the onset of Tarkovsky’s mature style,

here informed by two stylistic innovations that were only
embryonically present in Ivan’s Childhood, and which would
dominate all of the later films: a lengthy, episodic narrative
and a camera style largely comprised of long tracking shots.

S E A N M A RT I N

8 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 86

Furthermore, the film is dotted with sequences that are diffi-
cult to identify definitely as dreams or memories; indeed, it
is often not possible to determine who the dreamer is in
each case. The Russian Calvary scene is perhaps the most
memorable example: the sequence would appear to be
someone’s imagining of Christ’s return to Earth and his
crucifixion a second time (an obvious nod to Dostoyevsky’s
Parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ returns to
Earth and is arrested as a heretic by the Inquisition). But who
is imagining these events? Is it Rublev himself? Or his assis-
tant Foma? Theophanes? Perhaps even the film itself?
Tarkovsky provides us with no easy answers.

While the film’s narrative is episodic, one theme that

pervades the whole is that of the relationship of the artist to
the society in which he lives. Rublev, his fellow monks
Daniel and Kirill, Theophanes, the balloonist, the jester and
Boriska all embody different approaches to creativity and to
society.The two ‘artists’ we first see in the film are Efim, the
balloonist, and the jester. Efim risks all in trying to rise up
towards God (literally), while at the same time needing to
overcome his fear and the bigotry and superstition of those
who try to stop him taking off. The jester, in contrast, is a
man of the people, who, rather than being hounded by ordi-
nary people, is able to make a direct connection with them.
His mocking of the rich and powerful backfires, however (he
is betrayed by Kirill), and he is led away to face years of
torture and imprisonment.

Of the painters in the film, Kirill is untalented, blighted by

jealousy and arrogance; he fears God, but does not love his
fellow man. Daniel is a conformist who doesn’t believe in
innovation. While a kinder character than Kirill, his conser-
vatism limits his vision; he will remain forever in the foothills
of painting. Theophanes the Greek starts out as seemingly

8 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 87

nothing more than a cynical businessman, who, like Kirill,
does not love man; his art is there to uphold the spiritual
status quo and does not exist to try to inspire people to
better themselves or the world around them. It is only later,
in the scene where he comes back from the dead to comfort
Andrei in the sacked cathedral, that Theophanes is revealed
to be an artist of great stature: ‘How beautiful all this is,’ he
remarks of Rublev’s icons in the cathedral and warns Andrei
that he is committing a ‘grave sin’ in abandoning painting.

Rublev, in contrast to Kirill and Theophanes, possesses

both humility and a love of man (evinced by his voice-over
during the Calvary sequence, stressing that people are essen-
tially good and that perhaps Christ came to reconcile God
and Man), and puts himself at the service of both God and
Man – art, for Rublev, is there to bring the two closer
together. Although he becomes increasingly uncertain of the
power of art as he is (apparently) seduced by a pagan girl,
witnesses more Tartar horrors and ultimately kills a man, his
faith is restored by the young bell-founder, Boriska, who
works through faith alone: it is only when he reveals to
Rublev that his father never imparted the secret of casting to
him that Rublev decides to take up painting again.

Rublev and Boriska can be seen as complementary oppo-

sites: while both are ultimately men of faith, only Rublev’s
art is consciously directed towards serving both God and
Man. In contrast, the cocky young Boriska’s determination
to complete work on the bell is largely an attempt to save his
own skin. The two characters also have markedly different
approaches to their collaborators. When Rublev reprimands
his assistant Foma in the wood for eating too much and not
telling the truth, he does so gently, almost with humour. It
appears that Rublev’s concern matures Foma, as he later quits
the barely started cathedral in Vladimir, announcing that he’s

S E A N M A RT I N

8 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 88

been asked to paint a church in Pafnutievo. In contrast,
Boriska frequently behaves quite despotically towards his
team, even having one of them whipped at one point to
ensure that everyone is reminded of his authority.

Surprisingly, for a film about a painter, Rublev is not

shown painting (the nearest we get to seeing him at work is
during ‘The Last Judgment’, where he can be seen cleaning
an icon of the triumphant St George).This, and the decision
to show Rublev’s icons only at the end of the film, were
central to Tarkovsky’s conception of the film from the very
beginning of the project. He wrote in 1962 that ‘there will
not be a single shot of Rublev painting his icons. He will
simply live, and he won’t even be present on-screen in all
episodes. And the last part of the film (in colour) will be
solely devoted to Rublev’s icons. We will show them in
detail’.

This suggests that, for Tarkovsky, to show his hero

‘simply living’ would be an adequate method of representing
the past, a method that also has links to traditional forms of
artistic representation: that of landscape painting, mosaics and
icons themselves.

Landscape painting makes itself most obviously felt in the

Russian Calvary sequence, which has a Breughelesque
quality in the way Tarkovsky has arranged his actors within
the frame: characters in the background are frequently active,
going about their day to day business, ignorant of the drama
unfolding nearby, much as they do in Breughel’s The Road to
Calvary (1564). Also drawing from Breughel, Tarkovsky
dresses his characters in contemporary costume. The frame
teems with life during ‘The Raid’ (where the influence of
Kurosawa can be felt as much as that of Breughel), while
‘The Bell’ continues to echo the painter with its wide hori-
zons populated by Boriska’s team and those who have been
called in at the end to help hoist the bell for its inauguration.

8 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 89

Work by nineteenth-century Russian painters also influ-
ences the look of the film, especially when Andrei escapes
from the pagan village: his reappearance on the banks of the
river perhaps owes something to Alexander Ivanov’s The
Appearance of Christ to the People (1837–57) and Ivan
Kramskoi’s Christ in the Desert (1872).

Painting also shapes the narrative itself.Vittore Carpaccio

(c.1460–c.1525) was a particular favourite of Tarkovsky’s and
he writes enthusiastically about the ‘startling, uncanny
beauty’ of the Italian’s work in Sculpting in Time:‘As you stand
before them, you have the disturbing sensation that the inex-
plicable is about to be explained’, a comment which would
not be out of place in trying to describe Andrei Rublev. But
he continues: ‘the point is that each of the characters in
Carpaccio’s crowded composition is a centre’.

If we

approach Rublev as a mosaic made up of centres, its apparent
lack of a forward dramatic arch becomes irrelevant. As
Rublev’s journey is an interior one towards a realisation that
art must selflessly serve both God and Man, there is, in
reality, nowhere for him actually to ‘go’ physically. This,
coupled with the film’s measured pace and demanding
running time, suggests that Tarkovsky was attempting to
make the film timeless: as there is nowhere for Rublev to go,
Tarkovsky is inviting us to look around the world he has
created, a world which his characters – and his audience –
can fully inhabit.

The film is dominated by slow pans and tracking shots,

Tarkovsky’s camera investigating the glories and terrors, both
great and small, of this world. Several techniques that were to
become his trademarks appear for the first time, such as his
fondness for putting the same character in logically impos-
sible places within the same shot, a technique used to great
effect in the conversation between Rublev and Theophanes

S E A N M A RT I N

9 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 90

in the sacked cathedral, where Theophanes walks out of
frame right, the camera pans left with Andrei, and
Theophanes then reappears not from frame right, where he
should logically be, but from frame left.

Another device, that of panning with a character as they

walk until the camera picks up the person they are talking
to, the camera then following the second person and so on
(first used in Ivan’s Childhood when Galtsev reprimands
Masha in the field hospital) appears in Andrei Rublev – for
example, in Rublev’s encounter with the ghostly
Theophanes – and would become one of Tarkovsky’s basic
methods of covering a scene. Andrei’s dispute with
Theophanes by the edge of the wood is a veritable mini-
compendium of Tarkovskian leitmotifs: the characters are
frequently framed centrally; they spend large parts of the
scene facing away from each other; and the whole scene was
shot in one single take. The following sequence, that of the
Russian Calvary, is again typical of Tarkovsky’s mature style:
it would seem to be taking place in the imagination of one
of the characters, but, as already noted, we are not given any
clues as to whose vision it is.

The world as revealed to us by Tarkovsky’s long takes is

one in which the daily and the Divine are threaded together
in the fabric of life. The frequent conversation between the
characters illustrates this apparent dichotomy, such as when
Andrei and Daniel disagree about how to paint the Last
Judgment; the mention that the young assistant Peter has not
seen the Cathedral of the Assumption before; the stonema-
sons telling Rublev and Daniel about the Duke’s reaction to
their leaving; Theophanes asking Kirill if he has ever
prepared a wall before; and Boriska arguing with his assistants
about where to dig the casting pit or which clay to use. All
of these daily trivialities, artisan’s shop talk, are in sharp

9 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 91

contrast with the sacred nature of their work (which is also
reflected in the Russian Calvary sequence and the reappear-
ance of the Holy Fool at the end; with her wits now recov-
ered, she exudes a saintly aura as Rublev and Boriska lie in
the mud).

Tarkovsky does not, of course, show us Rublev’s world

solely through dialogue; almost every sequence in the film
has an ‘uncanny beauty’. After the jester’s routine has ended
in the first episode, the camera tracks around the hut exam-
ining people’s faces as they wait for the rain to stop, while an
unseen woman intones a wordless melody (perhaps she is the
woman to whom Daniel says ‘Christ be with you mistress’
when they leave?). Here Tarkovsky quietly celebrates ordi-
nary people in an ordinary, but somehow magical, situation.
They do not do anything, they simply wait. Tarkovsky
returns as often as he can to stillness and silence: the quiet of
the pagan village in the early morning; the wood after the
stonemasons have been blinded, with milk flowing into the
brook; and Andrei and Kirill sheltering from the rain under
a tree in the middle of a field, the camera following Andrei’s
gaze to hold on leaves blowing in the wind. Tarkovsky’s use
of nature is at once Orthodox (unlike most forms of Western
Christianity, the Eastern Orthodox Church regards nature as
good, not fallen) and also pantheistic, perhaps even quietly
pagan.

These silences in the film are made all the more powerful

by what surrounds them. Most notoriously, the film is
violent. The violence is both casual and ferocious: Kirill, on
his way to see Theophanes, passes a man being tortured to
death in the town square, and Theophanes later complains
that his young assistants have gone outside ‘to see how the
ruler will die’. Peter’s death from a gaping neck wound is
echoed in the saw whose blade undulates horribly next to

S E A N M A RT I N

9 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 92

him.The stonemasons have their eyes gouged out for daring
to agree to work for the Grand Prince’s brother. During the
sack of Vladimir, a horse is killed on-screen and a cow is set
alight.

There is also an earthiness to the film, in the form of

bawdy humour in the jester’s routine (he has a human face
painted on his buttocks) and bodily functions (the Holy
Fool’s first action on entering the cathedral is to urinate on
the floor).

The contrasts between the sacred nature of icon

painting or bell-casting and the tiring, filthy work that
creates them is echoed in the slow-motion shots of the sack
of Vladimir: the Grand Duke lording over it as the gold is
stripped from the church roofs; a pair of geese flying down
gracefully over the panicking crowd.

Icons themselves not only appear in the film – in Kirill’s

cell, in Theophanes’ workshop, in Rublev’s hands, in the
cathedral after it has been sacked and in the epilogue – but
also inform the film’s overall narrative strategy. As we have
discussed in the ‘Theory and Practice’ chapter, Tarkovsky
sought to encourage the viewer to watch his films actively,
working out connections for themselves; to be, in effect, a
co-creator of the films.This echoes what a number of writers
have said of icons. Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), a Russian
priest whose work Tarkovsky knew, held that ‘The icon
requires an active viewer who… works to array the discon-
tinuous image into a meaningful narrative.’

The French

critic Guy Gauthier, writing about Rublev, explained that
icons could be seen as windows into eternity, whose beauty
was derived from the divine realities that were present within
them, but whose inner qualities could only be fully under-
stood by people who were sensitive enough to perceive
them.

9 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 93

The Passion According to Andrei and Andrei Rublev

Andrei Rublev exists in three versions: two edits done in 1966
and a third first shown in 1969, running 205, 190 and 185
minutes respectively. Of these, the first and third versions are
available on DVD, and it is worth briefly examining the main
differences between the two, as they reveal how Tarkovsky
refined his ideas about the film.

In the 205-minute version, the Prologue adds a shot of

Efim being chased across the heath by a mob, making it
clearer that his flight has aroused local hostility. (The tracking
shot that follows him through the ground floor of the tower
is also an alternative take to the 185-minute cut.) After
Efim’s crash, the horse is seen rolling on its back for longer.
It eventually gets up and trots out of frame, leading us into a
shot of a horse walking past Efim’s prone body on the river-
bank. The camera then tracks past Efim to end on the
balloon. The 185-minute cut, by contrast, adds a shot of a
monastery when Efim is in the air, as if to link the Prologue
to the rest of the film, shortens the horse shot and omits the
track past Efim’s body.

‘The Jester’ begins in the 205-minute cut with a shot that

the recut version omits, showing Andrei, Daniel and Kirill
leaving their monastery to go and look for work as icon
painters. The scene in the hut is slightly longer in The
Passion: when the Jester does his second handstand, he reveals
that he has a Boyar’s face painted on his buttocks; and,
following Kirill’s comment that ‘the Devil sent Jesters’, there
is a complete 360º pan around the hut’s interior.

Episode 2, ‘Theophanes the Greek’, is the most radically

different in its original version. It includes a shot of one of
Theophanes’ assistants running downstairs carrying a pair of
buckets. In response to Theophanes’ complaints that his

S E A N M A RT I N

9 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 94

helpers are nowhere to be found, the young man with the
buckets explains that the other assistants have all gone
outside to watch the torture. Theophanes’ hectoring of the
mob in the original version takes place well before the end
of the scene, unlike in the recut version, where it happens at
the end.

When the action cuts to the monastery, the original edit

showed Kirill in his cell, and then the arrival of the
messenger to summon Andrei, not Kirill, to Moscow to
work with the Greek. In the recut, these two sequences are
switched and the scene in Kirill’s cell is also shortened.When
Kirill leaves the monastery, the scene originally concluded
with a shot of his dog dying in the snow, followed by a shot
of Kirill walking off into the woods.The recut version omits
both. The episode then originally continued with the scene
of Andrei chastising Foma in the birch wood, but, when he
came to recut it, Tarkovsky decided to make this scene the
first in a new episode, ‘The Passion According to Andrei’.
The recut of the scene also removed a long aerial shot, which
originally occurred after Foma had lifted the dead swan’s
wing, perhaps suggesting that Foma was imagining what it is
like to fly.

The original version of ‘The Holiday’ had a longer

ending, showing the Duke’s men appearing on the riverbank
and discussing amongst themselves whether Andrei and his
team are the people they’re looking for. ‘No,’ they decide,
‘these are strangers.’When they do locate the pagans, Marfa’s
attempts to escape are covered in two extra shots cut from
the 185-minute version, which show her struggling with her
persecutors and having her dress ripped off.The original cut
also makes it clear that, in this scene, she is played by three
different actresses, all the women whom Andrei had encoun-
tered during the night.

9 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 95

‘The Last Judgment’ contains one of the film’s most infa-

mous scenes, that of the blinding of the stonemasons; in the
recut version,Tarkovsky omits two shots to lessen the horror
of the incident. The Holy Fool’s first appearance in the
cathedral is also toned down: in the original version, her first
action upon entering the building was to urinate on the
floor. The other biggest change in the recut version of this
episode is Tarkovsky’s decision to move the flashback of the
three monks sheltering under a tree in the middle of a field
during a storm to the final episode, where it is cut into the
scene of the exhausted Boriska being carried out of the
casting pit on a fleece.

‘The Raid’ is the film’s most violent episode and most of

the main cuts that Tarkovsky made were to remove the most
shocking elements, easily the two most notorious being the
on-screen killing of a horse and the immolation of a cow. In
the original edit, the horse, after falling down the stairs, tries
to get up again, falls and is put out of its misery by a lance to
the heart. In the recut version, Tarkovsky cuts away before
the animal tries to regain its footing. The burning cow was
originally seen running around a yard, kicking its hind legs,
but Tarkovsky cut so much out of the scene that you can’t
actually tell what is on fire, as the cow is almost out of shot
in the extreme foreground.

Other cuts to the sequence

include shortening the Tartars’ ride into Vladimir at the
beginning of the episode, cutting some of the early
massacring and condensing the flashbacks of the Grand
Duke and his brother.

The film’s penultimate episode was the only one to expe-

rience a change of title. Originally known as ‘The Charity’,
it became ‘The Silence’ in the recut version. Kirill’s peniten-
tial reappearance at the monastery was also reworked. The
Passion According to Andrei shows Kirill being led inside, then

S E A N M A RT I N

9 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 96

recognised, and then prostrating himself before the abbot. In
the recut, Kirill’s arrival is not shown, and we also lose the
humour of the gatekeeper being rebuked for being too soft
a touch and letting all comers into the monastery (which
would explain why the Tartars get in later).The scene is also
split into two sections, with the Tartars arriving before the
abbot confronts Kirill. The episode originally ended with a
tracking shot of the Holy Fool on horseback with the Tartar
chieftain as they gallop away from the monastery. The recut
omits this.

‘The Bell’ remained largely unchanged in the shorter

version of the film, the several cuts being relatively minor.
The main difference, that of the placement of the tree flash-
back, has already been noted.

The ‘Epilogue’ remained the same in both versions of the

film, although the final shot of the horses grazing in the rain
was originally in colour. In the recut, it is printed in mono-
chrome.

The changes to the film do more than merely shorten it

and make it less violent. In general, the 185-minute cut
focuses more attention on Andrei himself, with other char-
acters – notably Kirill, Foma, the Holy Fool, Boriska and
Marfa – suffering at the hands of the re-edit. But in cutting
parts of scenes in which these characters appear, Tarkovsky
also created ambiguities, such as Kirill’s unexplained reap-
pearance in the monastery in ‘The Silence’. Such problems
did not appear to bother Tarkovsky, however, and he declared
that the 185-minute version was the definitive version of the
film. Interestingly, though, when Tarkovsky was trying to get
Eduard Artemyev to work with him on Solaris, he showed
him the original version, suggesting that he may perhaps
have regretted cutting the film. But if he did harbour regrets,
he never made them public.

9 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 97

A Portrait of the Artist

If Ivan’s Childhood had been autobiographical at one or so
removes, then Andrei Rublev would be even more so, but
would also serve to reinforce Tarkovsky’s own theories about
the role of the artist in society – his own role, in other words.
Indeed, Rublev is a classic case of film-as-metaphor, at least in
the way in which it was received in the West after it was
screened at Cannes in 1969. Several commentators writing
in Dossier Positif, the French magazine that championed
Tarkovsky from the early stages of his career, felt that in
talking about Rublev’s travails, Tarkovsky was talking about
his own: Michel Ciment saw the film as a ‘transparent alle-
gory’

of Tarkovsky’s own situation in the Soviet Union,

while Jacques Demeure saw the film as ‘a serene allegory
with no apparent connection to historical reality’.

In his own pronouncements on the film,Tarkovsky spoke

often of his concern for the role of the artist in society, and
how art reflected the aspirations of society as a whole. ‘I am
interested in the theme of the artist’s personality in its rela-
tionship to his time,’ he wrote in 1962, whilst attempting to
get Rublev off the ground. ‘The artist, on the strength of his
natural sensitivity, is the person who perceives his epoch
most profoundly and reflects it most fully.’

Art and artists

recur throughout Tarkovsky’s films: from the musical aspira-
tions of little Sasha in The Steamroller and the Violin to the
retired actor Alexander in The Sacrifice. For Tarkovsky, there
was no doubt that, although still a young art, cinema was the
heir to the older traditions, and that he himself, like Rublev,
was in a position to ‘perceive his epoch most profoundly and
reflect it most fully’.

S E A N M A RT I N

9 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 98

Solaris (1972)

H E

A M I LY

Alternate Title:

None

Production Company:

Mosfilm

Production Supervisor:

Vyacheslav Tarasov

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Friedrich Gorenstein,

based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
Director of Photography:

Vadim Yusov

Editor:

Ludmila Feiginova

Music:

Eduard Artemyev; JS Bach,‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesus

Christ’ BWV 639, from Orgelbüchlein
Art Director:

Mikhail Romadin

Assistant Directors

: A Ides, Larissa Tarkovskaya, Maria

Chugunova
Special Effects:

V Sevostyanov, A Klimenko

Costumes:

Nelly Fomina

Make-Up:

Vera Rudina

Sound:

Semyon Litvinov

Cast:

Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin), Natalya Bondarchuk

(Hari), Yuri Jarvet (Snaut), Anatoly Solonitsyn (Sartorius),
Vladislav Dvorzhetsky (Berton), Nikolai Grinko (Kelvin’s
Father), Sos Sarkissian (Gibarian) Olga Barnet (Kelvin’s
Mother), Tamara Ogorodnikova (Aunt Anna), Alexander

9 9

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 99

Misharin (Timolis), Olga Kizilova (Gibarian’s visitor),Yulian
Semyonov (Shannon), Georgi Tejkh (Professor Messenger)
Shot:

March–December 1971

Running Time:

165 mins

First Screening:

Moscow, 30 December 1971 (Rough cut)

USSR Release:

20 March 1972

First Screening in West:

Cannes Film Festival, 13 May

1972
Release in West:

1973

Awards:

Grand Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize, Ecumenical

Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival; Best Film of the Year,
London Film Festival

Storyline

The credits roll over a black screen to Bach’s Prelude ‘Ich ruf
zu dir, Herr Jesus Christ’.

Part One

Kris Kelvin is walking in the grounds of his father’s dacha,
deep in thought. Berton, a former cosmonaut, arrives. He
talks with Kelvin’s father. Kelvin, on the veranda, is caught in
a sudden downpour. On the table in front of him is a still life
of fruit and tea cups.When the rain stops, Kelvin goes inside.

Kelvin, Berton and Kelvin’s aunt, Anna, watch Berton’s

black and white film of his mission to Solaris and the official
enquiry afterwards. In this film within the film, Berton
claims to have seen a garden form on the surface of the
ocean of Solaris and then a gigantic child, four metres high.
The scientists are sceptical, as is Kelvin when the film ends.

Kelvin has uneasy conversations with both his father and

Berton. Kelvin feels that science should follow its own

S E A N M A RT I N

1 0 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 100

course, while Berton claims that knowledge without moral
scruples is invalid. Berton storms off; Kelvin’s father
announces that it’s dangerous to send people like Kelvin into
space.

Anna is watching a TV programme about Solaris, which

reveals that only three scientists remain on the station, Snaut,
Sartorius and Gibarian. The programme is interrupted by a
videophone call from Berton. He is driving back to the city.
He tells Kelvin’s father that the child he saw floating above
the ocean on Solaris was exactly the same (except for its
height) as one of fellow cosmonaut Fechner’s children.

Berton continues to drive into the city.We see shots from

the car as it travels along tunnels, underpasses and elevated
motorways.

Early the following morning, Kelvin burns old papers,

including a photo of a young dark-haired woman. Kelvin
tells his father that he’s taking a home movie with him.

Kelvin flies to Solaris. Upon his arrival, he finds the

station to be almost deserted. He locates Snaut, who tells
Kelvin that Gibarian has killed himself. Kelvin notices that
there seems to be someone asleep in the hammock that
Snaut has rigged up in his room.

Kelvin finds an empty room to use as his own and then

finds Gibarian’s. His room is in complete disarray. A note
bearing Kelvin’s name is stuck to the video monitor. Kelvin
watches Gibarian’s last message to him.While he is watching
it, he hears someone outside and runs to keep the door shut.
Kelvin picks up a gun left lying by the video recorder and
leaves, taking Gibarian’s tape with him.

He finds Sartorius’s room.They have a brief conversation,

interrupted by a male dwarf who runs out of Sartorius’s
room. Sartorius puts him back inside, telling Kelvin that he
is too impressionable.

1 0 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 101

Kelvin looks out of the porthole at the Solaris ocean (one

of a number of shots of its ever-changing surface throughout
the film), but is distracted by a young girl of about 12
wearing a nightdress who walks past him. He follows her to
a cold room, in which is stored Gibarian’s frozen body. The
girl is nowhere to be seen.

Kelvin returns to Snaut’s room. He asks Snaut if there is

anyone else on the station. The young girl walks past along
the corridor outside. Snaut refuses to answer who – or what
– she is. Kelvin accuses Snaut of being afraid.

Back in his room, Kelvin barricades the door and watches

the rest of Gibarian’s tape. The young girl offers Gibarian a
drink, but he pushes her away. Snaut and Sartorius knock on
his door, saying they want to help. Gibarian picks up a
syringe. He tells Kelvin that what is happening on the station
is something to do with conscience. Kelvin lies down and
gets some sleep with the gun by his side.

When he wakes up, he has been joined by the dark-haired

woman from the photo he burnt on the morning of his
departure for Solaris. They kiss. He asks how she knew
where he was. She accidentally kicks the gun away. She finds
a copy of the photo Kelvin burnt on his last morning on
Earth. She asks Kelvin who it is, then catches her reflection
in the mirror. She realises it’s herself. She tells Kelvin she feels
as though she’s forgotten something. She asks Kelvin if he
loves her; he calls her by her name, Hari, and tells her not to
be so stupid. He explains that he has work to do, but she
insists on coming with him. He tells her she’ll have to put a
space suit on. She can’t get out of her dress, as it has no zip.
Kelvin cuts her out of it, noticing a syringe mark on her arm.
He then notices that the boxes he used to barricade the door
are still where he put them.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 0 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 102

Part Two

Kelvin loads Hari into a small escape rocket and launches it.
Returning to his room, he is visited by Snaut, who realises
Kelvin has had ‘guests’. Kelvin informs him that Hari died
ten years ago. Snaut explains that what Kelvin saw was the
materialisation of his memory of her, which the ocean
obtains by probing their brains to extract ‘islands of
memory’. He tells Kelvin that Hari will return.

Kelvin wakes in the middle of the night. A new Hari is

with him in the room. She joins him in bed. The following
morning, Kris leaves his room to try to dispose of the shawl
the first Hari left behind. The new Hari panics when she
realises she is alone and breaks through the metal door of the
bedroom to join him. She is badly cut, but her wounds heal
before Kelvin’s eyes.

They visit Snaut and Sartorius in Sartorius’s lab. Kelvin

introduces Hari as his wife. Snaut greets her as if she were
human, but Sartorius regards her as a laboratory specimen, fit
only to be experimented upon. Kelvin threatens Sartorius if
he tries anything.

Kelvin shows Hari the home movie he brought from

Earth. It shows Kelvin as a boy, plus Kelvin’s father and his
dead mother in a snowy, Breughelesque landscape. It ends
with shots of the ‘real’ Hari outside the dacha. Hari claims to
be able to remember that Kelvin’s mother hated her, which
he denies.

Snaut calls by to tell Kelvin that the rate of regeneration

seems to be slowing. He proposes sending an encephalogram
of Kelvin’s thoughts into the ocean. He also invites Kelvin
and Hari to his birthday party in the library.

Sometime later, Kelvin wakes. Hari wants to know what

happened to the ‘real’ Hari, as, while Kelvin was sleeping,

1 0 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 103

Sartorius told her that she had killed herself. Kelvin explains
what happened and tells Hari that he loves her.

At the birthday party in the library, Snaut arrives late and

asks Kelvin to read a passage from Don Quixote. Sartorius
proposes a toast to Snaut and science, but Snaut is not inter-
ested. He ruminates on their predicament instead and
proposes a toast to Gibarian. Kelvin and Sartorius begin to
argue. Hari comes to Kelvin’s defence, declaring that he has
behaved humanly in an inhuman situation. Sartorius tells her
that she’s not a woman, but Hari retorts that she is becoming
human. Sartorius storms off; Kelvin escorts the drunk Snaut
back to his room.

Kelvin returns to the library to find Hari contemplating

the reproduction of Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow, which
hangs on the library wall. Close-ups of the painting from
Hari’s point of view follow, with imagined birdcalls and dog
barks. Kelvin and Hari float in each other’s arms weightlessly
around the library as the station changes its orbit.

Hari tries to commit suicide by drinking liquid oxygen,

but she comes back to life again. Kelvin tells her he will live
with her on the station. She tells him she’s afraid. At this
point, Kelvin becomes delirious, imagining his mother on
the station and then talking with her back in the dacha.

When Kelvin recovers from his fever, Snaut tells him Hari

is ‘no more’: she has been destroyed by Sartorius’s annihi-
lator. Snaut reads Kelvin Hari’s last letter to him. He also tells
Kelvin that the ‘guests’ have not returned since the
encephalogram was sent and that islands are starting to form
in the ocean.

In the library, Kelvin and Snaut talk about ‘the mysteries

of happiness, death and love’. Snaut thinks it’s time for Kelvin
to return to Earth.

We see Kelvin returning to the dacha. Inside the house, it

S E A N M A RT I N

1 0 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 104

is raining. His father seems oblivious to this. He sees Kelvin
and goes out to meet him. Kelvin falls to his knees, hugging
his father. The camera pulls slowly back to reveal that the
whole scene has taken place on an island in the ocean of
Solaris.

Production History

Tarkovsky began working on what would become his third
feature in the autumn of 1968. Perhaps unwilling to court
more controversy while Andrei Rublev’s troubles continued to
play out around him, he proposed filming Stanislaw Lem’s
novel Solaris, set firmly in the seemingly ‘safe’ genre of science
fiction. He worked on the screenplay with the novelist
Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002) throughout 1969, but, as
with his disagreements with Bogomolov over Ivan’s Childhood,
so Tarkovsky fell out with Lem, although in a more spectac-
ular fashion. Lem disapproved of Tarkovsky’s humanism and
was outraged by the first draft of the script, which had three-
quarters of the action taking place on Earth (in the novel, all
of the action takes place on board the space station). Not only
that, but Kelvin returned to Earth and his wife, Maria, at the
end. Tarkovsky and Gorenstein reworked the script, which
eventually had only about a quarter of the story taking place
on Earth, which, in the film, became the opening 40 or so
minutes and the character of Maria was cut completely.

Despite Lem’s continuing protests, the script seems to

have been approved in the spring of 1970 and in May
Tarkovsky was starting to cast the film. He initially wanted
the Swedish actress Bibi Andersson for the role of Hari, the
female lead, and also considered his ex-wife, Irma Rausch,
for the part.

100

The usual process of committee meetings at

both Mosfilm and Goskino dragged the project out through

1 0 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 105

the remainder of the year, with shooting finally starting with
the winter scenes (at the dacha and from the home movie)
in March 1971. By this time, Tarkovsky had settled on
Natalya Bondarchuk, the 20-year-old daughter of the
director Sergei Bondarchuk, as Hari.

Filming continued throughout the summer of 1971, with

Tarkovsky and Vadim Yusov falling into serious disagreement,
mainly about the choice of lenses they should be using:
Tarkovsky thought the film should have been shot with a
longer lens (50mm), which would have favoured the actors
over the sets, while Yusov favoured a 35mm lens, which would
have shown off the space station set to better advantage.
Tarkovsky was also not seeing eye to eye with his leading man,
Donatas Banionis; Banionis simply did not understand what
Tarkovsky wanted, a problem exacerbated by Tarkovsky’s
inability to express himself clearly. The problems continued.
On 12 July,Tarkovsky complained to his diary that they’d run
out of film stock, but were still nowhere near finished. On 10
August, he wrote that ‘work on Solaris has been hell. We’re
behind schedule… Yusov and I are constantly arguing.’ The
following day he noted, ‘Making Rublev was a holiday picnic
compared with this business.’

101

In early September, they seem to have run out of colour

Kodak stock again, this time necessitating the shooting of
certain scenes in black and white, such as the bonfire scene,
in which Kelvin burns his papers on the morning of his
departure for Solaris.

102

The ‘city of the future’ sequence, in

which Berton drives back into town from the dacha for
nearly five minutes of screen time, was shot in Tokyo between
24 September and 10 October, again, partially in black and
white to keep costs down. The scenes of Kelvin discovering
Gibarian’s body were shot as late as 10 December.

The first cut was shown at Mosfilm on 30 December

S E A N M A RT I N

1 0 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 106

1971, but, contrary to Tarkovsky’s fears, the film was passed.
(Some further cutting did, however, take place in early
1972.) It was released as a Category One film in the Soviet
Union on 20 March 1972,

103

and was first shown in the

West at Cannes on 13 May, with Tarkovsky himself in atten-
dance. The film met with a cooler response than either Ivan
or Rublev, but was still treated with respect and was awarded
the Special Jury Prize.

The ‘Soviet 2001’

When Solaris was shown at Cannes in 1972, it was hailed as
the Soviet ‘reply’ to Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey. But the
two films could not be more dissimilar: where Kubrick has
his camera firmly trained on the cosmos, Tarkovsky looks
back towards Earth, and man. There is, however, a link of
sorts between the two films, in that Tarkovsky watched 2001
before shooting Solaris. He disliked it intensely, finding it
‘cold and soulless’,

104

and resolved to make his film as

different as possible from Kubrick’s.

Although Tarkovsky frequently claimed that he didn’t like

science fiction – such as in one of his conversations with
Tonino Guerra in the documentary, Tempo di Viaggio – he in
fact read quite a lot of it, tending to favour ‘soft’ SF (in which
philosophical and moral issues take precedence over science
and spaceships), his favourite being Ray Bradbury.

105

This

approach to the genre tells us at once what kind of film Solaris
would be, and why Tarkovsky had such difficulty shooting it.

Tarkovsky and Lem

That Solaris turned out to be a film of quiet dignity and
humanism shows that Tarkovsky eventually prevailed over

1 0 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 107

both Stanislaw Lem, who objected to Tarkovsky’s deviation
from the theme of the novel, that of the nature and limits of
human knowledge and values, and Vadim Yusov, with whom
Tarkovsky argued constantly about what lens should be used
and how much of the space station set should be shown. In
the finished film, we only see parts of the station, as
Tarkovsky felt that dwelling on the set too much would
detract from the characters’ predicament.

The film follows the plot of the book quite closely,

although, as we have noted, Tarkovsky added the scenes set
on Earth – the prologue, the home movie, and the seeming
return to the dacha at the end. These are not found in the
novel and did not please Lem.The main difference between
Tarkovsky and Lem is in their treatment of the relationship
between Kelvin and Hari.

106

For Lem, the relationship is

mainly a vehicle to allow him to examine what happens
when people ‘try to stay human in an inhuman situation’.

107

Kelvin comes to realise that the things we hold dear, such as
love and forgiveness, mean very little in a universe that seems
to be oblivious to such values.Tarkovsky, on the other hand,
sees these same values as being intrinsic to our existence,
whether we are in a human situation (at home on the Earth)
or not (orbiting Solaris).

Furthermore, Tarkovsky’s approach to scientific thinking

and knowledge was diametrically opposed to Lem’s. Lem, in
both the original novel and much of his other work,
remained, if not cynical about human values, then certainly
regarded them as being inferior to a coolly detached, imper-
sonal view of a universe that may be organised along very
different lines to what we may imagine. Science, for Lem,
was our only real tool for coping with the potential strange-
ness and unknowability of the universe and any life it may
contain. Tarkovsky was in the opposite camp. In his diaries,

S E A N M A RT I N

1 0 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 108

he quotes Montaigne: ‘Our fantasies are worth more than
our judgments’,

108

which summarises his position pretty

well. For Tarkovsky, knowledge and truth were interior and
intuitive, whereas for Lem they were deductive and rational,
possibly even something wholly other to our experience.
While both the novel and the film agree that ‘there is some-
thing inside us which we don’t like to face up to’,

109

Tarkovsky and Lem were so fundamentally at odds with each
other that they effectively faced in opposite directions.

Tarkovsky and Genre

Tarkovsky’s dispute with Lem was, in effect, a clash between
Lem’s ‘hard’ science fiction and Tarkovsky’s own preference
for the ‘soft’ science fiction of writers like Ray Bradbury.
Despite Tarkovsky’s enthusiasm for the novel, it is clear that
what appealed to him were the themes of the book, which
he made his own.Watching Kubrick’s 2001 simply furthered
his resolve to make a film that could reasonably be described
as ‘revisionist soft science fiction’. For example, whereas
Kubrick’s space station is antiseptically clean and tidy, the
station in Solaris is as unkempt and dishevelled as its inhabi-
tants. By the time we reach the station, however, we have
already experienced perhaps the most radical aspect of
Tarkovsky’s revisionism both of the novel and the genre: the
scenes set on Earth.

In shots similar to one we have already seen in Rublev,

110

Tarkovsky shows us fronds swaying gently under the surface
of a pond.We then see Kelvin, standing, deep in thought. He
slowly makes his way back to the dacha. A more radical
beginning to a film about outer space – which is really a film
about inner space – could hardly be imagined. As Mark Le
Fanu observes,‘How often do we find such rapt intense still-

1 0 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 109

ness in films? No narrative at all for the time being; simply a
man, by himself, standing in the presence of nature,
thinking.’

111

Tarkovsky is hinting that this is really a film

about Earth, not space, and our inescapable ties with it.

The dacha, its contents and Kelvin’s relationship with his

father all continue to lay out themes that Tarkovsky will deal
with for the rest of the film. The family relations are some-
what opaque.The dark-haired older woman is not immedi-
ately identified as Kelvin’s aunt, Anna; all we can say of the
little boy is that he is presumably Berton’s son or grandson,
while the little girl with whom the boy plays is never iden-
tified at all. Photographs of Kelvin’s mother and Hari can
only be identified as such much later in the film when we
have seen both women ‘in the flesh’.

The layout of the dacha mirrors this confusion.The room

where they watch Berton’s film seems to be separate from
the room with the birdcage and the balloon prints on the
wall, but it is never identified as being so, while the room
where Kelvin ‘meets’ his mother in the delirium scene seems
to be a conflation of both rooms plus elements from the
space station.

112

Furthermore, Tarkovsky also conflates the

space and time of two rooms during the conversation that
Kelvin has with his father immediately after watching
Berton’s film. The conversation starts in the room with the
TV and then cuts away to the photograph of the woman,
whom we later learn is Kelvin’s mother. When we cut back
to Kelvin and his father, they are now in the room
containing the birdcage, plus Kelvin has his leather jacket
back on. This is the first of the film’s subtle disruptions of
objective space and time, which will become more
pronounced as the film goes on.

Despite the ambiguity of both the dacha and its occu-

pants, it is clearly a home to which they are devoted. Kelvin’s

S E A N M A RT I N

1 1 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 110

father tells Berton ‘I don’t like innovation’, and the furnish-
ings of the dacha reflect this. We can make out a classical
bust, Chinese vases, old prints of balloons on the wall and an
old, illustrated edition of Don Quixote that later mysteriously
reappears on the station. Home is clearly somewhere for
Kelvin – and Tarkovsky – that is strongly associated with
nature, art and culture.

Tarkovsky and Narrative

If, in the opening minutes of the film, Tarkovsky is modi-
fying the genre to suit his own purposes, he also starts to do
something else, namely to introduce small inconsistencies in
terms of plot and dramatic action. Most of these are unno-
ticeable at first, although the fact that we see Berton being
driven into the ‘City of the Future’ for nearly five minutes of
screen time suggests that space and time have already
become highly subjective, and will become more so once
Kelvin arrives at the station. Perhaps this sequence is so long
in order to suggest that Berton is ruminating about the prob-
lems Kelvin will inevitably face once he get to Solaris; then
again, it has its own rhythm and hypnotic beauty as much as
the pond at the beginning does. Perhaps Tarkovsky is
suggesting that the important journeys we need to make are
the ones that take place in everyday ‘ordinary’ reality.

Berton is related to several other unexplained inconsisten-

cies in the film. The first concerns his film, which lays the
ground for the rest of Solaris’s handling of narrative. At the end
of the film, the bearded academic (called Shannon in the
script) announces that ‘exploration in this area [i.e., Solaris]
will be discontinued’.

113

To judge by Berton’s appearance, we

could estimate that his film was shot 20 years earlier. Why
then, if exploration of Solaris was to be discontinued all those

1 1 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 111

years ago, is Kelvin being sent there to assess whether or not
to close down the station? It is a riddle that Tarkovsky leaves
unanswered. Berton’s film, in fact, gives us clear hints not only
about Solaris and what Kelvin will probably find there, but
also how Tarkovsky will relay the remainder of the story to us.
After viewing Berton’s film, in which none of the things he
saw over the ocean of Solaris were captured by his camera,
Shannon announces, ‘This report in no way, or in almost no
way, corresponds with reality.’ What he is saying, in other
words, is that there is a clear distinction between Berton’s
subjective, inner experience and the so-called objective reality
that his camera has caught and that the scientists have assem-
bled to discuss.As Solaris progresses, it is less and less concerned
with ‘corresponding to reality’, and more and more engaged
in depicting Kelvin’s inner world. Furthermore, the disjointed
space that the inquiry takes place in is ambiguous and suggests
that the remainder of the film will only appear to be objective.

Berton’s argument with Kelvin at the swing introduces

two further aspects of the film that Tarkovsky handles
elusively. Kelvin says that his clear goal is to assess whether or
not the station should be closed down and possibly to
bombard the ocean with heavy radiation as a last resort.
When he gets to the station, he discovers Gibarian’s film, in
which Gibarian also suggests bombarding the ocean with
radiation. However, when Kelvin meets with Snaut after he
has put the first Hari into the rocket, Snaut tells him that the
‘visitors’, as Hari and her ilk are called, only started to appear
after the ocean had been bombarded with radiation.

The other aspect of the meeting at the swing which sets

up a further puzzle is Berton’s reaction to Kelvin’s plan to
irradiate the ocean. ‘I am not an advocate of knowledge at
any price,’ he angrily retorts. ‘Knowledge is only valid when
it’s based on morality.’ Yet when Kelvin meets Sartorius for

S E A N M A RT I N

1 1 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 112

the first time, outside the latter’s laboratory on the station, he
takes a position somewhat similar to Berton’s, mocking
Sartorius for his talk of ‘duty’ and ‘truth’ and calling him
‘inhuman’. It is almost as if the ocean were somehow subtly
at work, distorting reality and clouding both the judgment
and the humanity of the characters.

Hari is a character inextricably linked to both the seeming

inconsistencies in the narrative and the idea that knowledge
is based on morality. When she first appears, she tells Kelvin
that he is ‘running around all dishevelled, like Snaut’, which
begs the question: has she met Snaut already? And if so, how,
as she is a product of Kelvin’s past and his conscience?
Similarly, when Hari tells Kelvin that Sartorius revealed how
the real Hari died, how could this meeting have happened if
she needs to be with Kelvin all the time?

As with Tarkovsky’s two previous films, some of the most

important narrative moments happen off-screen, such as the
recording and sending of Kelvin’s encephalogram and Hari’s
final meeting with Sartorius. This adds to the sense that
perhaps Kelvin does not understand the full import of what
is happening to him as the film becomes increasingly seen
from his point of view, although Snaut, ever conciliatory,
seems to be sympathetic to what Kelvin is going through
(although Snaut’s visitor is never shown).

Kelvin, perhaps inevitably, is headed for some sort of

personal crisis, which starts to manifest when Hari commits
suicide by drinking liquid oxygen.This is the second time he
has found her dead (the first being on Earth ten years previ-
ously), and it seems to push him finally over the edge: from
now on, time and space become increasingly unreliable.After
Hari resurrects,

114

we next see her and Kelvin in Kelvin’s

room, but they are wearing different clothes, so it is obvi-
ously sometime later, but we have no idea of how much time

1 1 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 113

has elapsed. Kelvin tells Hari he wants to live with her on the
station, but he has already agreed to the encephalogram that
will destroy her and the other visitors (does he now regret
agreeing to record the encephalogram, one wonders?).
Kelvin is then shown wandering about in his pyjamas, where
he meets Snaut by one of the outer portholes that look
down onto the ocean. Snaut tells him that the encephalo-
gram has been sent and appears to be working. Kelvin is then
helped back to his room by Snaut and Hari, with his fever
worsening: he imagines several Haris in his room, as well as
his dead mother and the family dog.

This then leads to a scene in which Kelvin ‘meets’ his

mother in what appears to be the dacha, but a variation of it
that includes a number of items of furniture from the station.
It is the second of the film’s ‘endings’, the first being the
library scene (see below), in which Kelvin attempts reconcili-
ation with those he feels he has wronged: Hari and his
parents.We know that Kelvin’s mother is from the past, as we
have only seen her before (outside of the photograph) in the
home movie (again, see below); although Kelvin’s mother
behaves kindly towards him, she reproaches him gently for
not calling, and for ‘leading some sort of strange life’. The
scene has a strange poignancy to it, somewhat reminiscent of
the scene between Andrei and the ghost of Theophanes in
Andrei Rublev. But in the former film, Theophanes seems to
visit Andrei in order to console him at a moment of crisis; in
Solaris, there is little comfort or reconciliation between
Kelvin and his mother. That appears to happen in the ‘final’
ending, that of Kelvin’s apparent return to Earth, where he
visits the dacha. We return to a recapitulated version of the
film’s opening, although now it is winter. Kelvin falls to his
knees in front of his father and hugs him.As the camera pulls
up and away from the house to reveal that it is on an island

S E A N M A RT I N

1 1 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 114

in the ocean of Solaris, Kelvin’s appears to have learnt to love
and forgive. It is the final narrative riddle in a film whose
richness would be the less without them. Is Tarkovsky trying
to suggest that, however objective and solid the world seems,
the real dramas take place on the subjective level where we
are all continually confronting our own ‘visitors’?

The Earth

But Solaris is not only a film whose narrative texture is
riddled with such quietly disconcerting conundrums. The
library scene, the first of the film’s ‘endings’, is the film’s
moral – and perhaps dramatic – centre of gravity.The library
is a repository of all that’s good on earth: art, literature,
culture and nature (in the form of paintings of it). It is a
conscious echo of the dacha.

Kelvin, Hari and Sartorius wait for Snaut in the library to

celebrate his birthday. When he arrives, an hour and a half
late, he is drunk and even more dishevelled than usual (the
arm of his suit has been torn). Sartorius proposes a toast to
his colleague and to science, but Snaut rebukes him,
declaring that ‘man needs man’ and that exploring space is a
waste of time. We don’t know what to do in the cosmos,
because we don’t know what to do with our home planet.
That they can’t deal with their visitors – their consciences –
is the root of their problems on the station. In short, Snaut
echoes Montaigne’s dictum that we go outside of ourselves,
because we do not know what is within us.

115

If there is

anyone on the station who does know what is within us, it is
Hari, and that is love.

Her increasing self-awareness is revealed in two scenes

that rank among Tarkovsky’s finest. The home movie shows
her the ‘real’ Hari for the first and only time. After shots of

1 1 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 115

Kelvin’s mother and father, and Kelvin himself as a boy, Hari
is seen outside the dacha. She waves (presumably it is Kelvin
who is filming her). In a closer shot, she turns to the camera
and gives the faintest hint of a smile. The sadness in her
expression speaks volumes: she has learnt the lessons of love,
that it can be painful, but with the pain comes self-knowl-
edge.The second scene shows her studying the reproduction
on Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow that hangs in the library.As
her gaze explores the painting, we hear earthly sounds bird-
song, dogs, distant voices as if Breughel’s world has suddenly
become animate. It may be a vicarious taste of life on Earth,
but it seems to be enough for her.

The birthday party ends in stalemate. Sartorius denies

Hari’s humanity, Snaut waxes lyrical and quotes Don Quixote.
At one point, he kisses Hari’s hand, as if to acknowledge the
seeming hopelessness of their situation. Kelvin is the only
one among them to treat Hari as human and, as if to demon-
strate his attachment to her, falls on his knees in front of her.
Kneeling in Tarkovsky is usually associated with the idea of
humility and the possibility that a character may grow and be
redeemed. Kelvin’s kneeling in the library is the apotheosis
of his own journey. In one gesture, he acknowledges his own
failings and begs forgiveness. That Sartorius immediately
shouts for him to ‘Get up!’ only makes Kelvin’s gesture the
more powerful.

Kelvin’s father’s warning that ‘It’s dangerous to send

people like you [Kelvin] into space’ could be taken as a
gloomy prediction that human beings will destroy the
ecology of other worlds as much as they have done on the
Earth. But when he continues to admonish his son, he uses
the words ‘Everything there is too fragile. Yes, fragile!’
Perhaps this is Tarkovsky’s way of saying that not only is
nature fragile when confronted with a science that has no

S E A N M A RT I N

1 1 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 116

moral basis with which to restrain it, but that we ourselves
are fragile, and are made more so in the process of exploring
space, which is little more than a displacement activity for
the real work of exploring ourselves. Solaris is Tarkovsky’s
testimony to the need to explore inner space while there is
still time.

‘I dreamed about her again last night.’

Despite the genre and epic scale of the film, Solaris is
Tarkovsky’s first major foray into autobiography.That he also
began work on Mirror in 1968 suggests that both films were
water drawn from the same well. Perhaps, after articulating
his role as a filmmaker in Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky now
turned his attention to what exactly an artist working in the
cinema should be addressing. After the features of the 1960s,
which concerned themselves primarily with Russia’s history
and the fate of those experiencing it from within,
Tarkovsky’s first two films of the 1970s – while not ignorant
of history, especially Mirror – are first and foremost films
about family relationships.

Solaris is more autobiographical than may at first appear to

be the case.Tarkovsky’s first marriage to Irma Rausch ended
in 1965 during the production of Andrei Rublev, when he left
her for Larissa Kizilova.Tarkovsky and Larissa got married in
1970, when Solaris was in pre-production; later that year, she
gave birth to Tarkovsky’s second son, Andrei Jr. Tarkovsky
noted in his diary at the start of production the following
spring that he was still troubled by the failure of his first
marriage: ‘I dreamed about her [Irma Rausch] again last
night – my heart was really painful.’

116

In one of the film’s

most powerful moments, the birthday party in the library,
Kelvin falls to his knees in front of Hari and clings to her

1 1 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 117

helplessly. In his treatment of Kelvin’s relationship to Hari,
Tarkovsky is eulogising his marriage to Rausch. At one
point, Tarkovsky even wanted Rausch to play the role of
Hari,

117

which would have made the film much more

confessional, almost on a par with the later Mirror.

Tarkovsky’s regrets over his first marriage are linked to his

relationship with his parents. ‘They blame me for [my
divorcing] Ira, I can feel that,’ he notes in his diary.

118

In the

same entry, he analyses his feelings for his mother and father:
‘It’s patently clear that I have a complex about my parents. I
don’t feel adult when I’m with them. And I don’t think they
consider me adult either. Our relations are somehow
tortured, complicated, unspoken. It’s not straightforward, any
of it. I love them dearly, but I’ve never felt at ease with them,
or their equal. I think they’re shy of me too, even though they
love me.’ A little later, he muses ‘Whose fault is it? Theirs, or
perhaps mine. Everybody’s, up to a point.’

119

After reminding

himself that he does indeed love his parents, his sister Marina
and eldest son Arseny (Senka, his child by Rausch), he berates
himself:‘A stupor comes over me and I can’t utter my feelings
[for them]. My love is not active, somehow.’

120

Kelvin spends much of Solaris in a similar stupor. He is

prickly with his father in the scene just after they have
watched Berton’s movie; his father admits ‘We don’t talk
much, you and I,’ to which Kelvin responds ‘I’m glad to hear
you say that, albeit on the last day [before Kelvin’s departure
for Solaris].’ The conversation is conducted in what would
become a familiar device, namely Kelvin and his father
frequently facing away from one another while talking. At
the film’s end, Kelvin returns to what appears to be Earth
and falls to his knees in front of his father in the doorway of
the dacha, much as he had done with Hari on the space
station. Kelvin is returning home to seek forgiveness; to

S E A N M A RT I N

1 1 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 118

underscore the point, Tarkovsky quotes Rembrandt’s
painting The Return of the Prodigal Son.

121

Kelvin’s relationship to his mother in the film is not so

prominent, mainly because she is only identified as his
mother in the scene towards the end of the film, when
Kelvin is delirious. We have learnt prior to this from Kelvin
showing the home movie to Hari that the blonde woman in
the film is his mother, and that she died before he and Hari
met. Hari immediately disputes Kelvin’s claim, saying that
she remembers his mother, who hated her. Kelvin is clearly
pained to recall the hostilities between the two women, and
tells Hari what happened between him and the ‘real’ Hari
back on Earth ten years previously.Although Kelvin’s mother
is obviously ‘distant’ – a criticism often made of Tarkovsky’s
own mother

122

– due to her death, when she does finally

appear in a dialogue scene in the film (the ‘delirium’ scene),
she is gentle and nurturing towards her son, washing his arm
and asking him ‘Why do you hurt us?’ Evidently, Kelvin
dreams of her during his illness because she can give him
what Hari – either the real Hari, or her neutrino copies on
board the station – cannot. Indeed, Kelvin’s mother behaves
almost like a lover towards him in this scene, heightening its
ambiguity.The blurring of the wife/mother roles – a device
which Tarkovsky would use in later films – perhaps owes its
origin to the fact that Irma Rausch bore a striking physical
resemblance to Maria Ivanovna.

123

It is these familial strains that give Solaris its humanity at the

same time as being one of the principal sources of the film’s
gentle melancholy.Yet, in attempting to deal with the ongoing
problem of his relationship with his parents and the ghost of
his first marriage, Tarkovsky produced a film of deep pathos
and power. But Solaris did not exorcise all of Tarkovsky’s
demons; that would be the task of his next film, Mirror.

1 1 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 119

Mirror (1974)

H E

A M I LY

I I

Alternate Titles:

A White, White Day (working title);

Confession (Original screenplay title); The Mirror
Russian Title:

Zerkalo

Production Company:

Mosfilm, Unit 4

Producer:

Erik Waisberg

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Alexander Misharin

Director of Photography:

Georgy Rerberg

Editor:

Ludmila Feiginova

Assistant Directors:

Larissa Tarkovskaya, V Karchekno,

Maria Chugunova
Art Director:

Nikolai Dvigubsky

Special Effects:

Yuri Potapov

Costumes:

Nelly Fomina

Make-Up:

Vera Rudina

Music:

Eduard Artemyev; JS Bach: ‘Das alte Jahr vergangen

ist’ BWV 614, from Orgelbüchlein, St John Passion BWV 245,
No.1, ‘Herr, unser Herscher’, No. 33, ‘Und siehe da, der
Vorhang im Tempel zeriß’; Pergolesi: Stabat Mater ‘Quando
corpus morietur’; Purcell: The Indian Queen ‘They tell us that
your mighty powers’
Sound:

Semyon Litvinov

1 2 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 120

Narrator

(Alexei): Innokenti Smoktunovsky. Arseny

Tarkovsky’s poems read by the author.
Cast:

Margarita Terekhova (Maria, Alexei’s mother/Natalya,

Alexei’s wife), Maria Tarkovskaya (Alexei’s mother as an old
woman), Ignat Daniltsev (Ignat/Alexei at 12), Philip
Yankovsky (Alexei aged five), Oleg Yankovsky (Alexei’s
Father), Nikolai Grinko (Ivan Gavrilovich, male colleague at
printers), Alla Demidova (Lisa), Yuri Nazarov (Military
instructor), Anatoly Solonitsyn (country doctor), Larissa
Tarkovskaya (Nadezhda Petrovna, the rich doctor’s wife),
Tamara Ogorodnikova (woman in Pushkin & deathbed/
sickbed scene), Olga Kizilova (redhead), Alexander Misharin
(doctor in deathbed/sickbed scene),Yuri Sventikov (Asafiev,
the orphan), T Reshetnikova, E del Bosque, L Correcher, A
Gutierrez, D Garcia, T Pames, Teresa del Bosque, Tatiana del
Bosque (Spanish twins), Andrei Tarkovsky (Alexei on his
deathbed/sickbed) (uncredited)
Shot:

July 1973–March 1974

Running Time:

106 mins

First Screening:

Moscow 1974 (Industry screening)

USSR Release:

April 1975

First Screening in West:

Paris, January 1978

Release in West:

1978

Awards:

Best film of the Year, French Critics’ Association,

1978

Storyline

Twelve-year-old Ignat turns on the television. He watches a
programme in which a boy who stutters badly is cured by
hypnotism. The hypnotist gets him to repeat his name and
then say ‘I can speak.’

The opening credits roll over a black screen to Bach’s

1 2 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 121

prelude ‘Das alte Jahr vergangen ist.’

Maria, Alexei’s mother, is sitting on a fence outside the

dacha. A voice-over by Alexei informs us that she is waiting
for her husband – Alexei’s father – to return home from the
war. A country doctor passes by and flirts with her. A myste-
rious wind gets up as he departs.

Maria and the children are seen inside the dacha as Arseny

Tarkovsky’s poem ‘First Meetings’ is read in voice-over by
the poet himself. Maria summons the children outside: the
barn is on fire.

The first dream: a wind blows along the edge, or out of,

the forest; Maria washes her hair as plaster falls from the
ceiling. She catches her reflection in a mirror, but it is not
herself as she is that she sees, but herself as an old woman.An
unidentified character warms their hand against a fire.

Alexei speaks to his mother on the phone. She tells him

that Liza, with whom she worked at the printing works, has
died.As the camera moves through the seemingly empty flat,
a French poster for Andrei Rublev can be seen.

Maria runs through the rain to the printing works. She

learns that the mistake she saw has somehow not gone to
press, much to her relief. The poem ‘From morning on I
waited yesterday’ is read in voice-over. Liza accuses Maria of
being just like Maria Timofeyevna from Dostoyevsky’s The
Devils. Maria flees to the shower block.

In the flat,Alexei and Natalya are arguing. He tells her that

she looks like his mother, and we see a shot of Maria walking
towards the dacha. Back in the flat, Alexei urges Natalya to
remarry. It is then revealed that some Spanish friends are in
the next room. Alexei asks Natalya to intervene before the
reminiscences cause an argument.

We then cut to newsreel from the time of the Spanish Civil

War – a bullfight, children being evacuated.This is followed by

S E A N M A RT I N

1 2 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 122

the Soviet balloon ascent of 1934 and the aviator Chkalov’s
return to Moscow after his flight across the North Pole (1937).
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater can be heard on the soundtrack.

The 12-year-old Alexei

124

looks through a Leonardo

monograph.

Ignat helps his mother to pick up coins when she drops

her purse. He tells her that he feels as though he has been
there before. After his mother leaves, a mysterious woman
and her maid appear in the flat. The woman gets Ignat to
read Pushkin’s 1836 letter to the philosopher Chaadayev

125

about Russia’s role and destiny.The woman vanishes, leaving
only a heat mark from her cup of tea on the table to attest
to her presence.

Ignat’s grandmother (Maria) calls at the flat, but strangely

fails to recognise Ignat.Alexei telephones. He asks Ignat if he
knows any girls and then tells him that he was in love when
he was Ignat’s age.

We then see the object of the young Alexei’s affections, a

teenage redhead with chapped lips, walking through a snowy
landscape as Purcell’s Indian Queen plays on the soundtrack.
Nearby, Alexei and boys his age are being given shooting
lessons at a firing range. One of the boys, an orphan called
Asafiev, throws a grenade onto the range. The instructor
throws himself onto the grenade. It is revealed to be a
dummy.

Newsreel footage shows the Red Army crossing Lake

Sivash in the Crimea in 1943.The poem ‘Life, Life’ is read in
voice-over.

Asafiev reaches the top of the hill above the firing range.
Further newsreel shows the tanks rolling in to liberate

Prague in 1945; the body of Hitler’s double; fireworks in
Moscow; the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima.

A small bird lands on Asafiev’s head.

1 2 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 123

More newsreel shows Mao’s Cultural Revolution in

China, and the Sino-Russian border conflict on Damansky
Island in 1969.

The young Alexei is looking at the Leonardo monograph

again. Maria chops wood.The father returns home from the
Front. Alexei and his sister Marina run into his arms. Bach’s
St John Passion can be heard on the soundtrack as we cut to
Leonardo’s Portrait of Ginevra de Benci.

In the flat, Alexei and Natalya discuss who should have

custody of Ignat. Outside, Ignat sets fire to the bush in the
courtyard.

The second dream: the forest is agitated by the wind

again; Alexei as a small boy tries to enter the dacha; Maria
chops wood in an outhouse.

Alexei as a 12-year-old accompanies Maria as she tries to

sell her earrings to a rich doctor’s wife. Alexei thinks of the
redhead while he waits; it is revealed that it is she who was
warming her hand against the fire. The doctor’s wife shows
Maria her new baby. She then asks Maria to kill a cock,
which she herself can’t do as she is pregnant again. Maria kills
the bird.We then see her and her husband, Alexei’s father. It
is revealed that she is levitating over their bed. Maria is then
shown fleeing from the doctor’s house without taking
payment for the earrings. The poem ‘Eurydice’ is read in
voice-over as Maria and Alexei walk along a riverbank.

This leads into the third dream: the wind comes out of the

forest again; the five-year-old Alexei enters the dacha; he is
seen holding a jug full of milk amid lace hangings and then
swimming as Maria washes clothes.

In what appears to be the modern-day flat, a doctor and

the two women from the Pushkin scene discuss Alexei’s state
of health. From his bed, Alexei tells them to leave him alone
and releases a small bird into the air.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 2 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 124

At the dacha Alexei’s father asks Maria if she wants a boy

or a girl. Maria thinks for a moment, looking away. Maria as
an old woman is seen leading the two small children across a
field as the opening of Bach’s St John Passion plays on the
soundtrack.

The music finishes, and the camera slowly tracks further

and further into the woods. Fade to black.

Production History

Like Tarkovsky’s other most celebrated film, Andrei Rublev,
Mirror had a long and convoluted history between concep-
tion, shooting and eventual release. Tarkovsky wrote that,
prior to shooting Mirror, he had been haunted by a recurring
dream: ‘I only know that I kept dreaming the same dream
about the house where I was born. I dreamed… as if I was
walking into it, or rather, not into it but around it all the
time.These dreams were terribly real, although I knew even
then that I was only dreaming… I believed that this feeling
carried some material sense, something very important, for
why should a dream pursue a man so?’

126

Tarkovsky spent a

number of years trying to grapple with these dreams and
give them coherent form.

The earliest scenes – some of the mother’s scenes and the

firing range – were written in 1964, while Tarkovsky was
preparing Andrei Rublev.

127

Tarkovsky at the time was appar-

ently thinking of writing a novella about his childhood expe-
riences, centring around the shell-shocked military instructor
who memorably survived into the final film.When Tarkovsky
and his co-author, Alexander Misharin, first proposed the
project to Mosfilm in late 1967, the figure of Tarkovsky’s
mother had become the person around whom the film
would be built. Tarkovsky and Misharin wrote the first draft

1 2 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 125

of the script in February 1968 while staying at the film-
makers’ retreat at Repino. Central to the script was an inter-
view with Tarkovsky’s mother, to be filmed with a hidden
camera, in which she would be asked various questions
covering topics as diverse as the war, her memories of her
own mother, art, the meaning of life, feminism, boxing and
UFOs. Mosfilm, however, turned the project down and, by
the autumn,Tarkovsky had begun working on Solaris instead.

The project, however, refused to leave Tarkovsky alone,

and, in 1970, he published some of his recollections as a short
story entitled A White Day. This offended Misharin, despite
the fact that the story was comprised of material written
before their writing stint in early 1968, and the two men
were not on speaking terms for a long while thereafter.The
publication of the story may have prompted Grigory
Chukrai, the head of Mosfilm’s experimental fourth unit, to
ask Tarkovsky for the script. Although he was about to start
work on Solaris, Tarkovsky felt A White Day dogging him
almost constantly:‘Whatever happens, I must make The White
Day… I think constantly about [it]… If only I had finished
Solaris, and it isn’t even started.’

128

By the summer of 1971,

while he was bogged down in the seemingly interminable
problems of Solaris, Tarkovsky was discussing A White Day
with Chukrai and dreaming ever more strongly of shooting
it:‘I so want to make The White Day’,

129

‘I want to start work

on a new picture [i.e. The White Day/Mirror]. I’m fed up with
Solaris’.

130

His diary contains frequent further references to the

project throughout the remainder of 1971 and into 1972. By
September of that year, the project was heading for a start
date and the film finally got the go-ahead six months later,
possibly due to what appears to have been a slight thaw
during the early days in office of the new head of Goskino,

S E A N M A RT I N

1 2 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 126

Filip Yermash, who told Tarkovsky ‘You can film whatever
you want.’

131

Tarkovsky’s intimations that he was about to

make a film of tremendous personal – and possibly artistic –
importance are revealed in a diary entry for 23 March 1973,
when he wrote ‘the time has come when I am ready to make
the most important work of my life’.

132

Permission to

develop the shooting script – effectively greenlighting the
film – was given three days later.

Filming started in July 1973, with the outdoor summer

scenes at the dacha.

133

Progress was slow, with only 22

minutes of footage being shot in the first six weeks.
Tarkovsky received an angry telegram from Mosfilm, chas-
tising him for his lack of progress, but their censure seems to
have had no effect on the work rate. A significant factor in
this state of affairs was Tarkovsky’s constant rewriting of the
script. There was never a single draft that everyone worked
from:Tarkovsky brought scraps of paper to the set every day
on which he had written what he wanted to shoot that day.

Tarkovsky did not see any of the rushes until September,

when he returned to Moscow after a break in filming.
Although he remained dissatisfied with some of the material,
he was open to suggestions made by bosses and colleagues at
the studio. Two significant things changed at this stage: the
interview with Tarkovsky’s mother was dropped (it was never
shot) and Margarita Terekhova’s performance as Maria,
Alexei’s mother in the childhood scenes, was so well received
that Tarkovsky wrote some new scenes for her as Alexei’s
estranged wife Natalya in the present-day scenes. Filming
resumed in November and lasted until the following March.
Almost the last thing to be shot was the scene with the
curing of the stuttering boy.

Editing presented numerous major problems. Given the

lack of a firm script, the film metamorphosed into around 20

1 2 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 127

different versions.Tarkovsky was not happy with any of them,
at one stage calling the film ‘shit’ in his work diary.The film’s
title acted as a barometer of Tarkovsky’s frequent changes of
mind: back in 1968, it had been called Confession, which was
then changed to A White,White Day (which was the title used
on the clapperboard during shooting), but Tarkovsky didn’t
like these, finding them ‘pretentious’ and ‘limp’. He consid-
ered Redemption (‘a bit flat’), Why Are You Standing So Far
Away? was ‘better, but obscure’ and Martyrology, which was his
favourite for a time, although he noted that ‘nobody knows
what it means, and when they find out, they won’t allow
it’.

134

Tarkovsky first refers to the film as Mirror in March

1974,

135

when editing was getting under way.

Various edits were screened at Mosfilm between March

and July, with the film’s running time dropping from 130 to
106 minutes. But Tarkovsky and his editor, Ludmila
Feiginova, were doing much more than merely tightening
the edit. Episodes migrated from one end of the film to the
other: the opening scene with the stuttering boy, for
instance, was originally in the middle until Feiginova realised
it would work well as an opening, acting almost like an
epigraph.The film met with a hugely divided response from
Tarkovsky’s colleagues. He was asked to make clear distinc-
tions between the past and the present, between dreams and
memories, and to ‘relieve the entire film of mysticism’.

136

August, Tarkovsky was refusing to make any more changes,
feeling that the film had finally gelled.

Kremnev, the new head of the fourth unit, called the film

a work of art, but these supportive voices were few and far
between.The official position on the film was that it was ‘an
obvious artistic failure’.

137

It was released quietly in April

1975, with Goskino making every effort to thwart the film’s
distribution abroad: Cannes asked for the film twice (in 1974

S E A N M A RT I N

1 2 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 128

and again the following year), but were turned down
without explanation, possibly because the festival director –
who had seen the film in Moscow – had guaranteed that
Tarkovsky would be given the Palme d’Or for Mirror, which
would be a major embarrassment for Goskino. Its first
screening in the West was not until January 1978, when a
premiere was held in Paris. It was voted the Best Film of the
Year and there was even talk of an Oscar nomination. ‘Not
that I want it,’Tarkovsky remarked in his diary, ‘but it would
be one in the eye for that idiot Yermash.’

138

Tarkovsky was so outraged at the treatment the film

received that he contemplated giving up making films alto-
gether, but was reassured by the remarkable number of letters
from ordinary people who had seen the film. Some were
admittedly baffled by it, but others wrote about how much
the film had touched them. ‘Thank you for Mirror,’ one
woman from Gorky wrote, whose letter is perhaps the most
poignant of all the ones that Tarkovsky quotes in Sculpting in
Time.‘My childhood was like that… only how did you know
about it?… in that dark cinema, looking at a piece of canvas
lit up by your talent, I felt for the first time in my life that I
was not alone.’

139

Filming the Soul

Tarkovsky’s desire to make a film based entirely on a char-
acter’s memory and inner world goes back, as we have seen,
to 1964. ‘It occurred to me… that from these properties of
memory a new working principle could be developed, on
which an extraordinarily interesting film might be built… It
would be the story of [the hero’s] thoughts, memories and
dreams… without his appearing at all.’

140

While Tarkovsky

was waiting for Mirror to get the go-ahead, he noted in his

1 2 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 129

diary, ‘There was a time when I thought that [a] film… is
going to be perceived in one and the same way by everyone
who sees it… But I was wrong. One has to work out a prin-
ciple that allows for film to affect people individually. The
“total” image must become something private. The basic
principle… is, I think, that as little as possible has actually to
be shown, and from that little the audience has to build up
an idea of the rest.’

141

Although Tarkovsky had been adhering to this rule of

showing as little as possible long before he wrote that diary
entry, Mirror marks a new phase in his narrative technique, as
it requires the viewer to be more active than usual in trying
to work out what exactly is going on. One critic described
Mirror as the nearest anyone had come to filming the soul.

142

Poetry, Memory and Dreams

A brief overview of the apparently loose structure of the film
will go some way to orientating the viewer on this, the
supposedly most difficult of Tarkovsky’s films. Although plot-
less in conventional terms, the film does in fact have a remark-
ably coherent form. The film has three time periods – the
present day, the mid-1930s and the Second World War – and
combines real time with dreams, memories, visions and news-
reel.The colour coding generally acts as a guide: the present-
day scenes are usually in colour and the dreams and visions are
often in black and white or sepia, although this is not always
the case. Lack of colour stock meant that Tarkovsky had to
film certain scenes, such as Alexei and Natalya’s last conversa-
tion in the flat, in monochrome, while the first scene after the
credits, clearly a memory, is in colour.This lack of clarity over
what we are watching was one of the main criticisms
Tarkovsky faced when the film was being completed, but it

S E A N M A RT I N

1 3 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 130

also adds considerably to the film’s richness and mystery.

Mirror’s prologue is the curing of the stutterer, which,

being placed at the start of the film, acts as a metaphor.When
the boy says ‘I can speak’, this is clearly also Tarkovsky
speaking as well. The fact that we are witnessing an actual
curing makes the scene immeasurably more moving (like
many things in Tarkovsky, the scene becomes more powerful
the more one rewatches it).The scene also establishes that the
film is ‘happening’ in the present. The Bach prelude used in
the opening titles, ‘Das alte Jahr vergangen ist’, was intended
for use at the New Year, perhaps suggesting that now that
Tarkovsky could ‘speak’, what is to follow is a new begin-
ning.

The first scene proper shows Alexei’s mother sitting on

the fence, waiting for her husband, Alexei’s father, to return
from the war. Alexei’s voice-over establishes this as a
memory, although is it his mother’s or his own imagined
recollections of the event? (It cannot be Alexei’s own direct
memory, as we see him and his sister Marina as small chil-
dren, asleep in a hammock nearby.) The doctor’s arrival
(written especially to get Tarkovsky’s favourite actor,Anatoly
Solonitsyn, into the film) is both a memory of yearning for
the father and, in the mysterious wind that gets up at the end
of the scene, a celebration of the natural world.

The use of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem ‘First Meetings’ at this

point not only offers a comment on the mother’s desire for
her husband (the poem celebrates physical love), but also on
the way Tarkovsky (junior) has attempted to capture his mat-
erial: ‘Every moment… / was a celebration, like Epiphany/
… Ordinary objects were at once transfigured.’

143

presenting moments like the mysterious wind which blows
up as the doctor leaves (and which will recur throughout the
film, coming out of/going along the edge of the forest), and

1 3 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 131

the subsequent barn fire without any conventional narrative
context, they are, as the poem suggests ‘at once transfigured’
into epiphanies.

The other three poems in the film also serve to transfigure

the apparently mundane world and also to comment upon
either the events or Alexei’s feelings towards those events.
The second poem, ‘From morning on I waited yesterday’

144

is full of foreboding about the disintegration of a relation-
ship; it is aptly placed, as the printing works, where the poem
is quoted, is a place full of foreboding.Although this, like the
other poems, is read by their author, Tarkovsky’s father, they
raise the question as to whose ‘voice’ it is: are they Maria’s
thoughts, or those of her eternally absent husband? (The
same can be said of the first poem, too. Is it his longing for
her? Or hers for him? The fact that Maria is seen crying at
the end of the sequence could suggest the latter, but
Tarkovsky, as ever, lets us make up our own minds.)

The last two poems move away from the strictly personal,

dealing with the poet’s duties in the context of the wider
world.‘Life, Life’

145

is read over newsreel footage of the Red

Army crossing Lake Sivash in the Crimea in 1943, and
reveals the poet to be conscious both of history and his own
role within it: ‘All of us are standing on the seashore
now,/And I am one of those who haul the nets/When a
shoal of immortality comes in’. There is an irony here, too,
in that the poem announces ‘On earth there is no death/All
are immortal’, while we are looking at men who may well
have been killed the very same day (as was the cameraman
who shot the sequence). In placing various generations of
the family at the same table, the poem uses the same kind of
collapsing of epochs that the film employs, while the final
lines see the poet leaving the family in the service of his
calling, which Tarkovsky, his father and Alexei all do.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 3 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 132

The final poem, ‘Eurydice’,

146

continues this idea of the

artist restlessly pursuing his muse, while acknowledging the
limitations of both his art and the frailty of the body. It is, in
effect, a celebration of the transitory, an interpretation rein-
forced by the fact that we see the young Alexei in his grand-
father’s house while the poem is being read, and we know
from the voice-over that this is a recurring dream that the
adult Alexei experiences, a doomed attempt to recapture the
paradise lost of childhood.

Following on from the barn sequence is the first of the

film’s three dreams, presumably being dreamt by the adult
Alexei.The camera tracks along the edge of the forest as the
mysterious wind returns, blowing along its edge (or even out
of it?). The young Alexei then wakes up and makes his way
to his parents’ room. A shirt is thrown across the doorway of
their room, suggesting hurried disrobing, but rather than
show the act of love, Tarkovsky gives us the striking
metaphor of Maria (the mother) washing her hair as plaster
falls from the ceiling.

147

This celebrated sequence shows

Tarkovsky’s affection for fire and water to great effect, but
also his concern for surfaces: watching it, one can almost feel
the weight of the plaster as it falls in slow motion, or the
dampness of the wall down which the water courses. For
Tarkovsky, there was no such thing merely as ‘backdrop’ or
‘scenery’; everything, even an old wall, has an important part
to play in helping to shape his poetic universe. A shot of a
hand shielding a burning branch concludes this, the first
‘movement’ of Mirror. The musical analogy is apt, as
Tarkovsky acknowledged that he ‘used the laws of music as
the film’s organising principle’.

148

The second and third dreams are also Alexei’s. The former

shows the dacha, together with a voice-over from Alexei
saying that he has the dream with ‘amazing regularity’, and

1 3 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 133

that in the dream he never succeeds in entering the house.
Coming as it does after Natalya’s complaint that nothing
miraculous ever seems to happen to her (the story of Moses
and the burning bush having come up in conversation),
Alexei’s admission that he can’t enter his grandfather’s house
suggests that he is as lost as Natalya, although this would
seem to be a fact that he has managed to keep hidden from
her.

The final dream has the poem ‘Eurydice’ laid over it.The

poem suggests that, although Alexei in the dream has now
managed to enter the dacha, the world of his childhood is as
lost as Eurydice herself.

The film moves into the present-day after ‘First Meetings’

has been read, in which the ever-offscreen Alexei talks on the
phone with his mother. She tells him that Liza, her colleague
from her printing works days, has just died.This leads into the
printing works sequence, which must either be the mother’s
memory, or Alexei’s imagining of it, as he wasn’t present.This
device establishes one of the organising tools of the film,
namely that the present-day scenes act as precursors to scenes
set in the past. For instance, the next scene in the flat shows
Alexei telling Natalya that she looks like his mother; ‘appar-
ently that’s the reason we divorced’, she replies, and this takes
us into a shot of Maria carrying a pail of water towards the
dacha with the unidentified man from the fire scene.

The printing works marks the beginning of Mirror’s

central movement, which will conclude with the firing-
range sequence. The era of Stalin’s terror is hinted at
through the use of sepia and the numerous fences, doorways
and drab corridors that Maria has to negotiate before she
can reach the office.

149

Again, things happen in slight slow

motion, with Maria’s breathing prominent in the mix.This,
a device Tarkovsky would come to use more in his later

S E A N M A RT I N

1 3 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 134

films, immediately makes us close to the character, sharing
in their interior experience.The other striking aspect of this
introduction to the printing works scene is its beauty: it is
as if Tarkovsky were content just to watch Margarita
Terekhova running through the rain, down steps, across
yards, into corridors. Here,Tarkovsky reveals the presence of
beauty in something that is apparently mundane and, para-
doxically (given the period), also potentially fatal for Maria
if the mistake she thinks she’s made has gone to press.
Showering afterwards, Maria recalls a fire in the field; a shot
of the fire closes this movement of the film.

The clash between Maria and Liza (the woman whose

death prompts the whole flashback) shows two typically
Tarkovskian characters, in that, when they fail to communi-
cate properly with each other, they fall back on literary
quotations to articulate themselves. Liza tells Maria she
reminds her of Maria Timofeyevna from Dostoyevsky’s The
Devils. Literary allusions occur frequently in the film: Maria
asks the country doctor whether he knows Chekhov’s story
Ward 6; Liza quotes Dante after Maria refuses to come out of
the shower; and Alexei disparagingly calls Natalya’s new
partner – an unpublished writer – ‘Dostoyevsky’.

The Newsreels: History as Film

The following sequence (or movement, to retain the musical
analogy), is one of the most remarkable in the film. While
Alexei urges Natalya to remarry, a group of Spanish friends
in the next room takes us into the first of the film’s newsreel
sequences. Unlike the rest of the film, the newsreel sequences
are placed in chronological order, beginning with the
Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s. Tarkovsky sought long
and hard for newsreel images that were fresh, not over-

1 3 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 135

exposed in the historical consciousness. The shots of the
Spanish children being evacuated to the Soviet Union are
remarkably poignant: a line of children march down the
street carrying their suitcases, almost autonomous already
from their parents; a father kisses his daughter repeatedly; a
little girl looks towards the camera as a train’s whistle blows.

We then cut to one of the most beautiful sequences of the

film, that of the record-breaking Soviet balloon ascent of
1934. As we have noted, balloons had previously appeared in
Tarkovsky, most notably in the prologue to Andrei Rublev and
in the dacha scenes in Solaris. But here Tarkovsky’s love of
flight is given free reign: the shots take on a strange life of
their own, almost as if Tarkovsky sees in the footage some-
thing not merely of historical or national interest, but rather
something eternal, a feeling heightened by the use of
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on the soundtrack.The poignancy of
the sequence is underscored by the fact that the balloonists
all died in the ascent. The flight theme is continued with
shots of the aviator Chkalov’s triumphant return to Moscow
after his flight over the North Pole in 1937. A sense of loss
attends the celebrations, as all Soviet viewers would have
been aware that Chkalov, a Soviet national hero, died in a
plane crash 18 months later. In using these particular news-
reels,Tarkovsky is subtly equating history, both personal and
national, with loss and a sense of sadness.

The subsequent newsreel sequences bring Soviet history

almost up to the time the film was made.The Great Patriotic
War is represented by the Lake Sivash sequence; the libera-
tion of Prague; the body of Hitler’s double lying in the ruins
of Berlin; a man on crutches (perhaps an acknowledgement
that when Tarkovsky’s father returned from the war, he was
on crutches due to losing a leg); and fireworks in Moscow
celebrating the end of the war in Europe. The euphoria is

S E A N M A RT I N

1 3 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 136

short-lived, as this almost immediately cuts to a shot of the
atomic bomb destroying Hiroshima. Post-war history is
captured with newsreel of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the
China of the 1960s and the Sino-Russian border conflict of
1969.

Unlike the earlier sequence, these wartime and post-war

newsreels are cut into the film in such a way that the orphan
Asafiev seems to ‘see’ them (or at least somehow be aware of
them) from where he is standing, either in the firing range,
or at the top of the hill where the bird lands on his head.This
is simply achieved by having the boy suddenly look to his
left, for instance, and then Tarkovsky cuts to Soviet tanks
liberating Prague. It is a simple, but effective, device and one
that brilliantly brings together the spheres of the personal
and the historical.Tarkovsky seems to be suggesting that we
are somehow connected to history, that we are always a part of
it. Indeed, the sense of unseen – perhaps even uncanny –
connections between people, history and nature is one of
Mirror’s finest accomplishments.

The historical context provided by the newsreels is also

present in the strange scene of the dark-haired woman who
mysteriously appears in the flat and asks Ignat to read
Pushkin’s letter to Chaadeyev. The letter speaks of Russia’s
role in saving Europe from the Mongol hordes and fore-
shadows the newsreel of Damansky Island. The continued
threat from the East suggests that history is not over, but is
still going on around us.

150

Art as Mirror

The first newsreel sequence ends with the young Alexei
looking at a monograph of Leonardo’s paintings and draw-
ings. Art functions in the film in a way similar to the news-

1 3 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 137

reels and the poems, to comment on the action and to
provide both a cultural context and to suggest that the char-
acters are linked to this tradition. The works we see most
prominently in the film are a self-portrait and the portrait of
Ginevra de Benci. The first needs no comment – the film,
after all, is a self-portrait – but the use of the second is slightly
more ambiguous, as it is presented without a context (in
other words, it’s not shown to be a close-up of a page from
the monograph, although the painting would have probably
been in it). Tarkovsky explained that he always found the
painting highly ambiguous: one minute the woman looks
attractive, the next repellent or sinister, feelings intended to
mirror the experience of the young Alexei upon his father’s
return.

The monograph scene also suggests a simultaneity of

periods: Leonardo’s own time and the present day somehow
existing at the same time. Tarkovsky was apparently inspired
to introduce this element into the film after studying a
photograph of his sister Marina and her son, which, due to an
accidental double exposure, also shows their mother, Maria
Ivanovna.

151

The following scene, of Ignat helping his mother

to pick up coins that have fallen from her purse, continues
this theme. Ignat suffers a small electric shock from one of the
coins. He then tells Natalya that he feels ‘as if it had already
happened’, but then adds ‘but I’ve never been here [i.e., on
the floor picking up coins] before.’ There are other instances
in the film: during the first dream, Maria sees herself as an old
woman reflected in the mirror; the ending shows her as an
old woman but with the children as they were when young;
while the firing range scene, cut as it is against the Lake Sivash
newsreel, suggests that the boys are already men.

The film also contains scenes that are not dream, memory

or present day. The mysterious woman who appears in the

S E A N M A RT I N

1 3 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 138

flat and asks Ignat to read Pushkin’s letter to Chaadeyev was
put into the film to add more historical context, but
Tarkovsky never explains who she is, or how she so mysteri-
ously appears and then disappears, leaving only a heat mark
on the table from her cup of tea. Likewise, Tarkovsky does
not explain the scene which portrays Alexei either on his
deathbed or sickbed; the woman and her maid are present
again.The dialogue here is extremely ambiguous: the doctor
says that ‘it’s a common case’ and that the man’s wife and
child have died suddenly.The woman denies this, saying that
no one in his family has died. Other mysteries: Maria’s levi-
tation; the old Maria failing to recognise Ignat when she calls
at the flat; the bird that lands on Asafiev’s head; and the final
marriage of past and present, memory and dream when the
old Maria leads the two children across the field, being
watched by Maria’s younger self as she was before the chil-
dren were born.

Tarkovsky’s Confession

The childhood memories that Tarkovsky drew on for Mirror
fall into three groups: the pre-war scenes set at the dacha; the
wartime scenes; and the dreams. The first scene after the
opening credits shows Maria waiting on a fence. Alexei
describes in voice-over how she would wait for passers-by to
reach the bush in the middle of the field: if they turned
towards the house, it meant that it was father, returning
home; if they carried straight on, it meant that they were not
father and that he would never return.This would appear to
be one of Tarkovsky’s own memories, as he writes that his
enduring memories of childhood were of waiting for the
war to end and for his father to come home. The barn
burning down is also an actual event: it happened when the

1 3 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 139

son of a family friend accidentally started a fire while playing
with matches. The dacha itself is taken from Tarkovsky’s
childhood and was reconstructed on the same foundations as
the original. Both its exterior and interior are faithfully
reproduced from Tarkovsky’s memory and the photographs
of Lev Gornung, Tarkovsky’s godfather, who photographed
the dacha between 1932 and 1935; he also took pictures of
Tarkovsky’s parents during their summer stays in the country
and of Tarkovsky and his sister Marina as small children.

152

In the film, the narrator identifies it as his grandfather’s
house.

The episode where Maria tries to sell a pair of earrings to

a rich doctor’s wife takes place in wartime, when Alexei is 12
years old. In reality, Maria Ivanovna apparently went across
the Volga one day to sell her earrings, but, unlike Maria in
the film, successfully concluded business and returned with a
sack of potatoes. Despite this bit of poetic licence, the hard-
ships of Tarkovsky’s family, to say nothing of the country as a
whole, were real enough, and they remained financially
straitened even after the end of the Great Patriotic War.
Another wartime episode, that of Alexei’s father returning
home, was based on Arseny’s unexpected return from the
Front in the summer of 1943, when Maria was working at a
children’s camp in Peredelkino, the writer’s retreat near
Moscow. Again, the hardships of wartime are encapsulated in
the briefly glimpsed interior of the dacha, when Maria is
chopping wood. Outside, Marina threatens that she’ll tell on
Alexei for stealing the Leonardo monograph. Tarkovsky’s
sister once made a similar threat to her brother during their
wartime stay at Peredelkino, when the young Tarkovsky
apparently cut pictures out of a book.

153

The dreams mainly concern themselves with the dacha

and the young Alexei’s attempts to enter it. The one dream

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 140

in which the location is ambiguous is the first one, which
shows Alexei’s parents together when his mother washes her
hair.The sense here is of Alexei’s exclusion from his parents’
conjugal bed. As has been noted,Tarkovsky was haunted for
years by dreams of the house where he was born, and we can
assume that the dreams of the dacha in the film are faithful
to the spirit of the dreams that he experienced.

The present-day scenes in Alexei’s flat chronicle the after-

math of his marriage to Natalya and his relationship with his
mother. Alexei tells Natalya that she looks like his mother
and that he always remembers his mother with Natalya’s
face. ‘Apparently that’s the reason we divorced,’ she quips in
response. In reality, Irma Rausch bore a strong resemblance
to Maria Ivanovna as she was when she was younger and the
two women remained close, even after Tarkovsky left her.
‘You only know how to demand,’ Natalya accuses him.
‘That’s because I was brought up by women,’ Alexei replies,
echoing Tarkovsky’s own upbringing.

Alexei and Natalya later discuss custody of Ignat, who

lives with his mother, as did Tarkovsky’s and Irma’s son
Arseny (also known as Senka). Natalya tells Alexei that he
should visit his son more often, as Ignat is missing him.
Alexei wants Ignat to live with him, which Ignat seems
reluctant to do and the conversation ends inconclusively.
Tarkovsky’s own situation was similar.‘What’s going on with
Senka?’ he writes in his diary. ‘Ira has done everything she
can to stop us seeing each other… Will things ever be all
right between Senka and me?’

154

Ignat wanders outside and

sets fire to a bush in the yard, which annoys Alexei; further-
more, the boy is not doing well at school, which troubles
Alexei:‘If he doesn’t finish school he’ll end up being drafted.’
Compare this with Tarkovsky’s diary entry for 13 June 1970:
‘I took Senka to school. My impression was that he had

1 4 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 141

failed [his exams].’

155

And on 1 September that year,

Tarkovsky complains that Senka is ‘dreadfully scatterbrained,
doesn’t concentrate, doesn’t pay attention’.

156

There are problems, however, with a straight autobio-

graphical reading of Mirror. Although Tarkovsky claimed that
‘everything happened, nothing was invented’, his friend and
collaborator Olga Surkova remarked

157

that the film was in

fact pseudo-autobiography, as it said nothing about
Tarkovsky’s relationship with his second wife and second
son. (Perhaps the poster for Andrei Rublev that can be seen in
Alexei’s flat is a hint that maybe Mirror is Tarkovsky’s life up
until his second feature?) The dacha is likewise a collage of
two separate locations. Alexei tells us in the film that the
house, in which he was born, belongs to his grandfather.
However, the dacha we see in the film is not the house in
which Tarkovsky was born, but the villa where the
Tarkovskys summered at Ignatievo, which belonged to the
Gorchakovs, who would become family friends. Tarkovsky
was indeed born in his grandfather’s house, but that was in
Zavrazhie.To be fair to Tarkovsky, though, we must note that
the reasons for choosing Ignatievo over Zavrazhie for the
film may well have been practical, as the house of his birth
had been submerged when the area was flooded during the
development of a hydroelectric project in 1950.

158

The fence

on which Maria sits when she talks to the country doctor
and the well from which she drinks when the shed burns
down are also taken from Zavrazhie and transplanted to
Ignatievo.

One major scene cannot be classed as autobiographical in

the strict sense, as Tarkovsky was not present when it took
place, namely the printing works episode.While it is possible
that Tarkovsky chose to have Liza recite the opening lines
from Dante’s Inferno during this sequence – ‘Halfway

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 142

through this earthly life I awoke to find myself in a dark
wood’ – as a possible reference to his own perceived midlife
crisis, the sequence is more properly described as a cross
between a scene from his mother’s life and a Soviet urban
legend, in that the printing error is something Maria
Ivanovna heard about as happening to someone else (the
mistake supposedly being a misspelling of ‘Stalin’ as ‘Sralin’,
meaning ‘shitting man’).

There are other scenes in the film where the autobio-

graphical element has been subordinated to the fictive or
poetic process. The pre-credits scene of the healing of the
stutterer, while a mock documentary scene staged by
Tarkovsky, is actually a real healing – the boy and the hypno-
tist are not acting – and its purpose in the film is metaphor-
ical. When the boy says ‘I can speak’, it is clearly Tarkovsky
himself talking.The end of the first dream, where Maria sees
herself as an old woman, is one of the ways in which
Tarkovsky links the two timeframes of the film, while
echoing his father’s poem ‘I only need my immortality for
my blood to go on flowing from age to age’, recited over the
Lake Sivash newsreel. The same device recurs at the end of
the film, where Alexei’s father asks Maria if she wants a boy
or a girl and Maria looks away, to see herself as an old woman
again, but with her as yet unborn children.

The ‘Pushkin’ scene, in which a mysterious woman gets

Ignat to read Pushkin’s 1836 letter to Chaadeyev, was added,
according to Tarkovsky, in order to provide a historical
dimension to the film. (This was also the reason for the addi-
tion of the newsreel sequences.) The mysterious woman
reappears in what is perhaps the film’s least explicable scene,
that of Alexei on either his sickbed or deathbed.The doctor
(played by Tarkovsky’s co-screenwriter, Alexander Misharin)
says that ‘a mother dies suddenly, then the man’s wife and

1 4 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 143

child. A few days, and the man is no more,’ to which the
woman replies, ‘But no one died in his family.’ Is the doctor
being rhetorical here, not referring to Alexei specifically? It
would seem so, as one of the women asks Alexei (played by
Tarkovsky himself, although only his chest and arm are
seen)

159

what will happen to his mother if he doesn’t get up.

The conversation then moves on to discuss conscience,
memories and guilt, which would seem to point to
Tarkovsky’s own position. ‘Mirror was not an attempt to talk
about myself,’ he wrote on Sculpting in Time.‘It was about my
feelings towards people dear to me; about my relationship
with them; my perpetual pity for them and my own inade-
quacy – my feeling of duty left unfulfilled.’

160

Whether

Alexei is dying in this scene is highly ambiguous. Tarkovsky
wrote that the film was comprised of episodes that the
narrator remembered ‘at an extreme moment of crisis
[which] causes him pain up to the last minute’.

161

If the

scene is indeed a deathbed one, then it takes on a prophetic
air, as would Stalker and The Sacrifice after it.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 144

Stalker (1979)

R I P T Y C H

Alternate Title:

The Wish Machine (Working title)

Production Company:

Mosfilm, Unit 2

Production Supervisor:

Alexandra Demidova

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky [and Andrei

Tarkovsky, uncredited], based on their novel, Roadside Picnic
Director of Photography:

Alexander Knyazhinsky (1978),

Georgy Rerberg (1977, uncredited), Leonid Kalashnikov
(1977, uncredited)
Production Design:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Boym

(1977, uncredited), Shavkat Abdusalamov (1977, uncredited)
Editor:

Ludmila Feiginova

Assistant Directors:

Larissa Tarkovskaya,

Maria

Chugunova
Music:

Eduard Artemyev, Beethoven: Symphony No.9,

Ravel: Bolero,Wagner: Meistersinger
Musical Direction:

Emil Kachaturian

Costumes:

Nelly Fomina

Make-Up:

V Lvova

Sound:

V Sharun

Cast:

Alexander Kaidanovsky (Stalker), Anatoly Solonitsyn

(Writer), Nikolai Grinko (Professor), Alissa Freindlikh

1 4 5

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 145

(Stalker’s Wife), Natasha Abramova (Monkey), F Yurna, E
Kostin, R Rendi
Shot:

February–September 1977, June–November 1978

Running Time:

161 mins

First Screening:

Moscow, May 1979

USSR Release:

May 1979

First Screening in West:

Cannes Film Festival, 1980

Release in West:

1980

Awards:

Special Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize, Ecumenical

Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 1980; Luchino Visconti
Prize (awarded at the 1980 Taormina Festival)

Storyline

Part One

The opening credits play over a shot of a down-at-heel bar,
filmed in sepia. A caption then appears, explaining the
mysterious appearance of ‘The Zone’ in the small country in
which the film takes place.We then see Stalker, his wife and
their daughter asleep in a big brass bed in a dingy flat.A train
passes. A fragment of Wagner’s Meistersinger can be heard.
Stalker gets up and dresses. His wife argues with him in the
kitchen, but he leaves.

He meets Writer in the docks, who is drinking and

talking to a smartly dressed young woman about the lack of
mystery in modern life. Stalker sends Writer’s lady friend
away.The two men go to the bar, where Professor is waiting
for them.Writer says that he wants to go to the Zone for the
sake of inspiration, while Professor claims to be motivated by
scientific curiosity.

The men leave the bar and drive in a jeep to an aban-

doned industrial area, avoiding the police as they go. They

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 146

follow a train into a heavily guarded floodlit area, where
they are shot at by the police. They journey into the Zone
on a railcar.Writer asks if they will be followed, but Stalker
reassures him that the authorities fear the Zone ‘like the
plague’.

The film cuts to colour. Stalker refers to the Zone as

‘home’ and goes off to be by himself for a while. Professor
tells Writer that Stalker is an ex-convict and that his daughter
is some kind of mutant. He mentions that another stalker,
Porcupine, became fabulously wealthy and hanged himself
after a trip into the Zone. He then describes the Zone – how
it mysteriously appeared 20 years earlier, possibly as the result
of a meteorite, and that it contains a room where one’s
innermost wishes can come true. The authorities have been
guarding it ever since, allowing access to none.

Stalker returns and the three men continue on their

journey. Stalker throws nuts attached to bits of cloth in
order to navigate through the Zone’s booby traps. Writer
wants to walk straight towards the building that contains
the Room. Stalker warns him not to. A voice calls out,
telling him to stop. Writer returns to the other two. None
of them can explain the voice. Stalker tells the two men
that people have died in the Zone. They bicker. Professor
decides to stay put and wait for the other two to return, but
Stalker forbids it.

Part Two

Stalker calls for the other two to join him and creeps along
a wall. In voice-over, we hear ‘Stalker’s Prayer’, which asks for
Writer and Professor to be given faith, and which goes on to
paraphrase the Tao Te Ching celebrating the virtues of weak-
ness and flexibility. Professor wants to go back and collect his

1 4 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 147

rucksack, which he has left behind. Stalker tells him to forget
it and they set off again.

They come to a waterfall, nicknamed ‘the Dry Tunnel’.

Writer notices that Professor has disappeared. They emerge
from the Dry Tunnel to find Professor waiting for them.
Stalker thinks that they have walked into a trap and urges
them to rest. Writer and Professor exchange insults, then
discuss art between dozing.

A dream sequence follows, which contains a voice-over

(read by Stalker’s wife?) from Revelation 6:12–17 as the
camera tracks over industrial and military detritus submerged
in shallow water. Also visible is a fragment of the Van Eyck
brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece.

The men arrive in a dark tunnel known as ‘the Meat

Grinder’. They draw lots to see who will go first. Writer
draws the short straw. At the far end of the tunnel, he finds a
door. He produces a pistol, but Stalker shouts at him to drop
it.Writer goes through into a flooded room. He wades across
it. Professor and Stalker follow.

Writer goes ahead into a room containing small sand

dunes. Stalker shouts at him to stop. Two birds fly across the
room: one vanishes in mid air, while the other lands on one
of the small dunes.Writer collapses, suffering a sharp pain to
the head.When he recovers, he delivers a monologue about
his disgust with his profession and himself.

Stalker recites a poem written by Porcupine’s brother

(who died in the Meat Grinder). (The poem is ‘But there has
to be more’, actually by Tarkovsky’s father.)

The three men argue in a small room that contains a tele-

phone. It rings. Writer answers it. It’s a wrong number.
Professor then dials the laboratory where he works and
speaks with a colleague, saying that he has found something
hidden in bunker number four and that he is now on the

S E A N M A RT I N

1 4 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 148

threshold of ‘that place’. His colleague tells Professor that his
career is over; he can see Professor hanging himself in jail
once they return from the Zone.

Professor thinks that the Room will be misused by both

politicians and those bent on saving the world. Writer
believes that the world cannot be saved.

Stalker leads them to the threshold of the Room. He tells

them to get ready for the most important moment in their
lives.Writer declines to go in, as he feels he would be humil-
iating himself. Professor takes a bomb out of his bag,
declaring that the Room will never make anyone happy and
that it is better to destroy it than have it fall into the wrong
hands. Stalker tries to snatch the bomb from Professor.
Writer breaks up the tussle, accusing Stalker of being only
interested in money and the fact that he can play God in the
Zone. Stalker denies these are his motives.Writer announces
that the real reason why Porcupine hanged himself was that
he realised his deepest wish was for money, not the desire to
save his brother.

The three men sit down outside the Room. Professor

dismantles his bomb and throws the parts into the Room,
where it begins to rain inside. The sound of a train passing
can be heard, along with a fragment of Ravel’s Bolero.

The film cuts back to sepia: Stalker’s wife meets the men

at the bar. Stalker accompanies her and their crippled
daughter, Monkey, back to their flat.

The film cuts back to colour to show Monkey apparently

walking. It is revealed that she is riding on her father’s shoul-
ders.

Back at the flat, and again in sepia, Stalker laments

exhaustedly that no one has any faith any more. His wife
addresses the audience, telling us about the hardships of life
married to a stalker. But she has no regrets, for, if there were

1 4 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 149

no sadness in life, then there would be no happiness either.

Cut to colour: Monkey is reading. She puts the book

down; in voice-over, we hear her recite the poem, ‘How I
Love Your Eyes’ by Fyodor Tyuchev. She then seems to move
three beakers across the tabletop telekinetically. She rests her
head on the table. Outside, a train rattles past, and a snatch of
Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is heard.

Production History

Tarkovsky first read Roadside Picnic, the novel by Arkady and
Boris Strugatsky on which Stalker is based, in early 1973. He
noted in his diary that a ‘tremendous’ screenplay could be
made out of the novel.

162

It is not clear whether he himself

wanted to direct the film, but once Mirror had been
completed and a proposal to film Dostoyevsky’s novel The
Idiot had been turned down, Tarkovsky’s thoughts began to
return to the Strugatsky brothers’ novel. By March 1975, he
was in talks with the brothers over the script, and by the
autumn, when the proposal was submitted to Mosfilm, it
seemed as though the film would go ahead the following
summer. At this stage, the project was called The Wish
Machine.

The usual bureaucratic delays meant that the film did not

actually start shooting until February 1977, by which time
Tarkovsky was also directing a stage adaptation of Hamlet in
Moscow.The scenes set in the Zone were originally to have
been shot in Isfara, in the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan, but
an earthquake there just before shooting was scheduled to
begin scuppered the plan and Tarkovsky instead chose to
shoot in Estonia. By July 1977, when all the exteriors had
been shot, it had become apparent that there was a fault with
the film stock and everything had to be scrapped.Tarkovsky

S E A N M A RT I N

1 5 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 150

started again from scratch, but the production ran into
further trouble when the state of the equipment was found
to be wanting. Tarkovsky’s relationship with Georgy
Rerberg, his Director of Photography, was also deteriorating
and Rerberg was fired. Although Leonid Kalashnikov took
over almost immediately, there was now a major problem in
that two-thirds of the budget had already been spent, but
they still had very little usable footage. Yermash tried to
persuade Tarkovsky to drop the film, but Tarkovsky refused,
instead seeking permission to make Stalker as a two-part
film.

163

This would provide both more money and extend

the delivery date. While this application was going through,
the film closed down.

Tarkovsky used this opportunity to rewrite the script. In

the new version, the Stalker underwent a radical change,
from being ‘some kind of drug-dealer and poacher… to… a
slave, a believer, a pagan of the Zone’.

164

Tarkovsky

continued to rewrite the script, even during postproduction,
to such an extent that the Strugatskys claimed ‘We are not
the scriptwriters, he [Tarkovsky] did it all – alone.’

165

Filming was further delayed when Tarkovsky, perhaps not

surprisingly, suffered a heart attack in April 1978, which
forced him to spend two months in a sanatorium. Finally, in
June, shooting on the film started for the third time.
Tarkovsky was also onto his third cameraman, as Kalashnikov
had refused to continue working on the film. His replace-
ment was Alexander Knyazhinsky. Shooting was difficult,
mainly because the money they had been given for the
hypothetical second part of the film had to be used to fund
the entire production, and so Tarkovsky was constantly
forced to cut corners and pare down the film as much as
possible. Filming lasted until November, by which time
Tarkovsky had started editing. He became ill again in

1 5 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 151

February 1979 and at one point thought he was going to die.
To Tarkovsky’s surprise, Stalker was accepted with relatively
few changes. The film was completed by May, when it had
its first industry screening, and went on release in the Soviet
Union the same month.The film was first shown in the West
a full year later, at Cannes in May 1980, where it met with
an overwhelming response.

Tarkovsky’s Triptych

Stalker is the first film in Tarkovsky’s ‘late’ period, which
would see his films become pronouncedly more philosoph-
ical in tone, and also more minimal in terms of plot and art
direction. These last three films are also marked by an ever-
lengthening take, as well as by the use of almost impercep-
tibly slow zooms and an ever greater difficulty in
determining whether events portrayed on-screen happen
externally or internally. In essence, Stalker, and the two films
that follow it, are closely linked enough to be said to form a
triptych in which Tarkovsky’s main theme is the catastrophic
state of the world and the desire to avert the looming apoc-
alypse.

As with Solaris,Tarkovsky faced problems with the science

fiction genre of the Strugatsky’s original novel. In Roadside
Picnic, there are six Zones, to which the various Stalkers go
to forage alien equipment (the Zones being perhaps the
result of an alien visitation, or ‘roadside picnic’, 20 years
before). In the film, this was whittled down to one, but a
number of other elements remain, namely the ‘Plague
Quarter’ (the deserted industrial area where the three men
steal the trolley car); mention of the Zone being full of aban-
doned military vehicles and equipment; the use of the nut-
weighted ribbons; the idea that to progress one needs to

S E A N M A RT I N

1 5 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 152

make significant detours; that the Stalker has a crippled
daughter; that the Zone is a place where normal rules of
empirical space–time do not apply; and that there is some-
thing in the Zone that grants one’s innermost wishes.

In the novel and the original script, this was called the

‘Golden Ball’, which would be one of the principal victims
of Tarkovsky’s reductionism. He would further strip away the
violent deaths and supernatural occurrences of the original
novel to be left with what he termed a ‘philosophical
parable’. In another departure both from the novel and his
earlier films, Tarkovsky wanted to observe the three classical
unities of space, time and action, and also deliberately to
omit some of his signature motifs, such as horses and apples.
There is very much a sense that Stalker is, for Tarkovsky, a
new beginning.

The Landscape of the Soul

Stalker is frequently described as being an allegory.The char-
acters, for instance, do not have names; instead, they are
labelled for what they are: Stalker, Writer and Professor. By
having characters from what was called the ‘Two Cultures’ by
the Soviet intelligentsia, Tarkovsky was aiming to portray
two different approaches to life: Professor is rational, while
Writer is intuitive. Between them stands Stalker, a man of
faith to whom Tarkovsky said he felt closest of the three.

But is the film an allegory of faith, or of life in the Soviet

Union, a combination of the two, or something else alto-
gether? Typically, the setting is not identified as the Soviet
Union, but, according to the opening title, as ‘our little
country’.With its drab look, military guards and general air of
pollution, Stalker could easily pass for a contemporary Eastern
Bloc country. Maya Turovskaya memorably described the film

1 5 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 153

as ‘far from being something from the world of tomorrow [a
reference to the film’s nominal science fiction status], this
looks more like today, or rather the day before yesterday.’

166

The unseen threats of the Zone call to mind the phantom
presence of the secret police, while Stalker’s comment that he
is imprisoned everywhere also suggests that Tarkovsky is
making a comment on life in the USSR. It should be noted,
too, that the Gulag camps were known as ‘the Zone’, a fact
that would not have been lost on a Russian audience. Mark
Le Fanu notes that, ‘When the film was shown in front of a
native audience, no aspect of it was perceived as more alle-
gorical than Stalker’s whirling of bolts in different oblique
directions.The making of a detour of several miles to progress
a mere hundred paces. “Of course,” said my friend, “that’s
exactly what life is like in the Soviet Union!”’

167

And yet it would not do justice to the film to read it in

entirely this way. The men, although nameless, are fully
rounded characters whose constant barrage of arguments
and insults makes them both three-dimensional and ulti-
mately sympathetic. Tarkovsky, in concentrating on their
lined, anxious faces, imbues each of them with a quiet
dignity. Indeed, Stalker is one of the great films of the human
face – principally Kaidanovsky’s, but Solonitsyn’s world-
weary visage is almost as equally compelling, such as in the
approach to the Dry Tunnel, or in the Meat Grinder – and
it is here that we can perhaps detect the film’s deeper
meaning than that of mere allegory.Alexander Kaidanovsky’s
shaven-headed Stalker is as iconic as Falconetti in Dreyer’s
The Passion of Joan of Arc, and it is Joan’s suffering and saint-
hood that reveal the bedrock of Stalker. It is ultimately a film
about the search for faith and the difficulties the seeker
encounters on the path.Viewed this way, the Zone becomes
a landscape of the soul.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 5 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 154

The film also makes great – and daring – use of silence

and stillness. Often nothing ‘happens’ in conventional terms
for minutes on end. The sequence where the men journey
into the Zone on the trolley car is perhaps the most cele-
brated example: for over three minutes, Tarkovsky’s camera
patiently looks at the faces of the three men as they head
towards the unknown. Eduard Artemyev’s score and the
hypnotic clanking of the railway tracks bolster the sense of a
threshold about to be crossed. But perhaps even more radical
is the shot of the three men sitting outside the Room at the
end of their journey. For over four minutes, they simply sit
huddled in the dirt, gazing into the enigma of the Room: the
light fluctuates; Professor dismantles the bomb and throws
parts of it into the water; it starts to rain within the Room;
the rain ceases; the men continue to sit. Finally, when we cut
back to the bar, nothing is said.The three of them are by now
exhausted and dishevelled, and yet the silence conveys the
possibility that all three have learnt something about them-
selves. As Stalker and his wife leave the bar,Writer looks on,
contemplatively smoking a cigarette. Again, there is no
dialogue.There is no need for any. (The shot is, in retrospect,
even more moving when one realises that it is the last time
we are to see Anatoly Solonitsyn in a Tarkovsky film. He was
to die in June 1982.

168

)

The Wasteland and the Grail

If Stalker is a film about faith, then its basic narrative struc-
ture could be compared with the narrative of the Grail
Quest. Traditionally, the knights who set out to find the
Grail would traverse a strange landscape full of magical
encounters.‘Here begin the terrors, here begin the marvels’,
as one Grail text puts it,

169

a phrase perfectly apt for Stalker.

1 5 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 155

The terrors and marvels of the Zone are depicted in a more
restricted colour palette than usual: greens, greys and blacks
dominate.The characters, with their superstitions and beliefs,
could easily be straight out of the Middle Ages, a feeling
reinforced by the absence of many of the trappings of
modernity once the men reach the Zone.

The strangeness of the Zone is made most manifest in

Tarkovsky’s handling of space and time. Space is frequently
non-representational and ambiguous, especially in the film’s
second part. For instance, in the scenes shot around the tiled
wall,Tarkovsky does not show all three characters together at
the same time; it is up to us to determine how the charac-
ters are positioned in relation to each other. Stalker is shown
alternately looking apparently towards Writer and Professor,
yet at other times, he appears to be facing away. In some
shots, he is lying on his back, in others, on his front. When
Stalker and Writer approach the Dry Tunnel, we see Writer
look around, and then move out of frame to the right. The
camera then begins to track right, but does not pick up
Writer again almost immediately where we would expect
him to be, but only after it has passed the arches through
which cascading water can be seen.Writer looks puzzled, as
if he is aware that he has managed to cover all that ground
in the blink of an eye. A similar effect occurs during the
dream, where we see Stalker sleeping on the ground, and the
camera then tracks away from him to examine the various
detritus that lies in the shallow water. The track finishes
when it picks up Stalker’s hand lying semi-clenched at the
opposite end of the water, as if he is in both places at once.
In this way,Tarkovsky adheres to the three classical unities of
space, time and action, but also subverts them.

Stalker comments that the Zone seems to change by the

minute:‘I don’t know what’s going on here in the absence of

S E A N M A RT I N

1 5 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 156

people, but the moment someone shows up, everything
comes into motion. Old traps disappear and new ones
emerge. Safe spots become impassable. Now your path is
easy, now it’s hopelessly involved. That’s the Zone.’

170

then adds significantly [emphasis added] ‘It may even seem
capricious. But it is what we’ve made it with our condition.’This
implies that the Zone’s true nature is something akin to the
mind, which also changes by the minute unless one has
learnt to master it. That the film has such a slow pace
(Tarkovsky said he wanted to convey the idea that the film
had been made in a single take) makes watching it a medita-
tive experience. It suggests that what the Room grants is in
fact the discovery of the Grail – to continue with this
metaphor for a moment – within oneself, perhaps with the
aid of meditation or contemplation. In other words, if faith
is rediscovered, then the self is also, and vice versa.

Tarkovsky is not merely concerned with the salvation of

individual seekers in the film, but also of society as a whole.
He laments the secularisation of the world, but does not offer
an explicitly Christian solution: the voice-over known as
‘Stalker’s Prayer’, with its praising of weakness, is actually para-
phrasing the Tao Te Ching. Faith, for Tarkovsky, is ecumenical;
it matters not what God or Goddess one serves, as long as one
has the capacity to believe, and to love. If there is a miracle at
the end of the film, it is not Monkey’s apparent telekinetic
abilities, but Stalker’s wife’s continuing love for her husband.
Human love, for Tarkovsky, is the miracle, especially in a world
as bereft of spiritual values as the world of Stalker seems to be.

Ecology and Prophecy

Stalker’s distinctive look was the work of no fewer than three
separate production designers: Alexander Boym, Shavkat

1 5 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 157

Abdusalamov

171

and finally Tarkovsky himself. It is one of

the first films to feature a post-industrial aesthetic, which
would later recur in films from directors as diverse as Terry
Gilliam and David Fincher. It is a world of decay and debris
where what truly matters has been forgotten. The dream
captures this with great simplicity: the camera, in one of the
tracks over shallow water that punctuate the film, moves over
a variety of industrial and military debris that lie abandoned
beneath it. At one point, we glimpse a detail of the Van Eyck
brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, surrounded by algae and rusting
coins. A more succinct – and cinematic – portrayal of the
neglect of spiritual values would be difficult to imagine.

As Mark Le Fanu has noted, with Stalker Tarkovsky

becomes ‘one of the great contemporary artists of poverty,
understood in its true spiritual sense.’

172

It is the poverty not

only of a materialist world bent on self-destruction, but also
of the ‘poor in spirit’ – people such as Stalker – who will
eventually find the Grail and redeem the wasteland. And yet
such optimism is somewhat tentative. While Tarkovsky
clearly yearned for a better world, he realised that it would
take a colossal effort and the signs for this did not look good.
It is this despair that gives Stalker its power, and is what
prompted the Polish director Andrzej Wajda to describe the
film as Tarkovsky’s ‘throwing down the gauntlet’ to all of us
who live in the developed world.

The film’s spiritual wasteland is also an actual wasteland

caused by pollution. Although the film is one of Tarkovsky’s
most waterlogged, much of the water appears filthy and stag-
nant. The decay evident everywhere seems not so much to
be the result of an alien visitation (which was thought to
have caused the Zone to appear), but of a man-made catas-
trophe.This threat is made much more real and urgent by the
fact that the film uncannily pre-empts the disaster at the VI

S E A N M A RT I N

1 5 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 158

Lenin Nuclear Power Station in Chernobyl in April 1986.
Not only was a zone created around the facility and the
nearby town of Pripyat (where many of the power station’s
staff lived), into which people were forbidden to enter, but
also the explosion itself happened in the Fourth Reactor: in
the film, Professor finds the nuclear device with which he
hopes to destroy the Room in the ‘fourth bunker’. That
Tarkovsky also quotes from Revelation during the film only
adds to the sense of prophecy. The name Chernobyl in
Ukrainian means ‘Wormwood’, which many took to mean
‘The Star Wormwood’, which falls from Heaven in
Revelation to make a third of the Earth’s waters fatally
bitter.

173

The bitter waters in the film may have even led to

Tarkovsky’s own death and to the deaths of most of the prin-
cipal cast and crewmembers. Sound engineer Vladimir
Sharun believes that the power station visible at the end of
the film, when Stalker, his wife and Monkey walk back to
their flat, was pouring out chemicals into the water. He
noted ‘white foam floating down the river. In fact, it was
some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic
reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the
right bronchial tube. And Tolya [Anatoly] Solonitsyn too.
That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker
became clear to me when Larissa Tarkovskaya [Tarkovsky’s
wife and the film’s assistant director] died from the same
illness in Paris.’

174

Other fatalities from the film include

Professor, Nikolai Grinko, who died in 1989, Alexander
Kaidanovsky who, unlike the others, did not die of cancer,
but suffered a heart attack in 1995 at the age of 49, and the
film’s brilliant Director of Photography, Alexander
Knyazhinsky, who died in 1996. Tellingly, Alissa Freindlikh,
all of whose scenes as Stalker’s wife were shot at Mosfilm, is

1 5 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 159

still alive (a double was used in the power station shot at the
end).

175

Autobiographical Elements

After Mirror, Tarkovsky’s childhood dreams stopped.
‘Childhood memories, which for years had given me no
peace, suddenly vanished, as if they had melted away, and at
last I stopped dreaming about the house where I had lived so
many years before.’

176

He ‘felt as though he had lost himself

in a certain sense’.

177

If that is the case, then it is no surprise

to find Tarkovsky filling this apparent void in his life by
working on a stage production of Hamlet – perhaps the
greatest work on the ethics of action and human purpose
ever written – in Moscow during 1976–7. Shakespeare’s
philosophical enquiries are echoed by those of Stalker, which
Tarkovsky began shooting while the play was still running.

The film that Stalker most closely resembles is Rublev. In

the earlier film, Tarkovsky identified with the artist-monk
and his mission; in the latter, it is Stalker’s faith that proves to
be one of the film’s main centres of gravity. Stalker is, if
anything, an autobiography of the spirit: in it, Tarkovsky’s
own aspirations and fears are allowed full reign. It could be
argued that, once his childhood phantoms had been laid to
rest, Tarkovsky, as he had done in Rublev, once more turned
his gaze outward, only to find a world bereft of faith and
hope. Stalker, like all of Tarkovsky’s work, occupies an inde-
terminate position with regard to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’: the film
is simultaneously a record of Tarkovsky’s own inner land-
scape at the time it was shot, but at the same time, it is also
reaching out, wondering if a better world can be made.The
address made directly to the audience by Stalker’s wife at the
end of the film exemplifies this position perfectly. It is a cry

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 160

from the heart, but one that acknowledges a tension, if not a
dialogue, between the outer and inner aspects of human
experience.

If the film as a whole can be seen more as ‘the soul’s land-

scape, after confession’,

178

rather than ‘straight’ autobiog-

raphy, two incidents in the film are, in fact, taken from
Tarkovsky’s own experience. Once the three men are in the
Zone, Writer becomes tired of the ‘nuts and bandages’ that
the Stalker is throwing ahead of them to detect the Zone’s
booby traps, and decides to make straight for the ruined
building across the meadow that contains the Room.When
he is nearly at the threshold of the building, a mysterious
wind blows up, more sinister than the one in the ‘country
doctor’ scene in Mirror (both the doctor and Writer are
played by Anatoly Solonitsyn). A male voice commands:
‘Stop! Don’t move!’ Writer retreats back to where Stalker
and Professor are anxiously waiting; all three men deny
uttering the command and, in a state of uncertainty and
unease, move on. Compare this with something Alexander
Gordon remembers Tarkovsky once telling him about an
incident that took place when Tarkovsky was in Siberia:
‘Andrei… was lying in a hunter’s hut all alone one windy
night… the trees were rustling and a storm was coming.
Suddenly he heard someone say: “Get out of here!” It was a
clear, quiet voice; Andrei didn’t move a muscle. Then he
heard it again: “Get out of here!” Andrei ran out of the hut,
either in response to the command, either out of fear, or for
some other reason he couldn’t explain himself. Right then
an enormous larch, cracked like a match by a powerful gust
of wind, fell on the hut right over the place where he had
been lying just a minute before… we were sceptical about his
story. Andrei kept insisting that it really happened to him.’

179

The film’s final scene owes its origins to something less

1 6 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 161

dramatic, but, again, something directly from Tarkovsky’s
own experience. The scene shows Monkey, Stalker’s
daughter, apparently moving some beakers across the
tabletop by telekinesis. It is based on a scene from one of the
films of Eduard Naumov, who made documentaries about
the paranormal. In one film, Naumov shows the psychic
Ninel Kulagina moving items across a tabletop while under
the scrutiny of a panel of scientists. As Vladimir Sharun
recalls, ‘Tarkovsky attentively watched Naumov’s film and
after it was finished he immediately exclaimed: “Well, what
do you say, here is the ending for Stalker!”’

180

Despite his nominally Orthodox upbringing, Tarkovsky

was interested in paranormal phenomena of all kinds. It is
relatively well known that in the late 1960s he attended a
séance in Moscow, at which the spirit of Boris Pasternak
predicted that Tarkovsky would only make seven films, a
prediction that Tarkovsky refers to on a number of occasions
in his diary. In another diary entry (7 February 1976) – while
discussions were under way to get Stalker made – he
mentions going to see a clairvoyant. At one point,Tarkovsky
even took his dog to see one (health problems in the hind
paws were diagnosed). Stalker, along with The Sacrifice, is
perhaps the most ‘supernatural’ of Tarkovsky’s films. That
events which defy rational explanation came to appear more
in these later films is a possible sign that Tarkovsky was either
becoming increasingly mystical as he got older, or more
convinced that only miracles can now save us.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 162

Nostalgia (1983)

R I P T Y C H

I I

Alternate Title:

Nostalghia (Italian title)

Production Company:

Opera Film. RAI (Rome)/Sovin

Film (Moscow)
Producer:

Francesco Casati

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Tonino Guerra

Director of Photography:

Giuseppe Lanci

Editor:

Erminia Marani, Amedeo Salfa

Music:

Verdi: Requiem ‘Requiem aeternam’; Beethoven:

Symphony No. 9 ‘Choral’; Russian and Chinese folk music
Art Director:

Andrea Crisanti

Assistant Directors:

Norman Mozzato, Larissa Tarkovskaya

Costume:

Lina Nerli Taviani

Make-Up:

Giulio Mastrantonio

Sound:

Remo Ugolini

Special Effects:

Paolo Ricci

Cast:

Oleg Yankovsky (Andrei Gorchakov), Domiziani

Giordano (Eugenia), Erland Josephson (Domenico), Patrizia
Terreno (Maria, Gorchakov’s wife), Laura De Marchi
(woman with towel), Delia Boccardo (Domenico’s wife),
Milena Vukotic (Municipal employee), Alberto Canepa

1 6 3

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 163

(peasant), Raffaele Di Mario, Rate Furlan, Livio Galassi,
Piero Vida, Elena Magoia
Shot:

Autumn 1982

Running Time:

126 mins

First Screening:

Cannes Film Festival, May 1983

First Screening in USSR:

April 1987

Release in West:

1983/4

Awards:

Grand Prix de Création, Ecumenical Jury Prize,

FIPRESCI Prize, Best Director, Cannes Film Festival 1983

Storyline

The opening credits roll over a sepia shot of some women
(whom we later learn are Gorchakov’s family in Russia) and
a child in a misty landscape.The music is an Italian folk song
that is replaced by Verdi’s Requiem.

Gorchakov and his interpreter, Eugenia, drive to visit

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Childbirth. Gorchakov
refuses to go into the church. Eugenia witnesses a fertility
ceremony, but finds herself unable to kneel to pray. She has a
brief conversation with the sacristan, who tells her it is a
woman’s duty to bear children.

Gorchakov and Eugenia wait in the hotel lobby, discussing

Arseny Tarkovsky’s poetry, translation and the difficulties of
understanding another culture. Gorchakov feels that the only
way for people to get to know one another is to abolish
borders between states. Eugenia asks Gorchakov why
Sosnovsky, the composer whom Gorchakov is in Italy to
research, returned to his native Russia. Gorchakov tells her
that he began to drink, eventually taking his own life. Eugenia
tells him of a maid from the south who burned down the
house of her master, out of nostalgia for her home town.The
hotelier appears and they are shown to their separate rooms.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 164

Gorchakov dreams of Russia (shown in black and white). He
loiters in his room. Eugenia knocks and asks him if he wants
to call his wife in Moscow; he declines. Gorchakov dreams of
his pregnant wife, who appears to levitate above his hotel bed,
and also of Eugenia.

Gorchakov and Eugenia visit St Catherine’s Pool.

Eugenia tells bathers taking the waters that Gorchakov is a
Russian poet researching the life of the Russian composer
Sosnovsky.The bathers also comment on Domenico, a mad
recluse who can be seen nearby, saying that he has locked his
family up for seven years to await the end of the world.
Eugenia tells Gorchakov that everyone thinks Domenico
mad; his latest obsession is to try to carry a lighted candle
across the pool.

Gorchakov and Eugenia visit Domenico, who is initially

reluctant to welcome Gorchakov into his home, a semi-
derelict building. Once inside, Gorchakov finds a diorama
laid out on the floor that mirrors the landscape which can be
seen from the window. Domenico offers Gorchakov some
bread and wine. He explains that he was only trying to save
his family, but now the whole world must be saved. He gives
Gorchakov the candle, and charges him with the task of
carrying it across St Catherine’s Pool. He hints that ‘we’ are
planning ‘something big’ in Rome.

A sepia sequence follows in which we see the authorities

liberating Domenico’s family. Domenico struggles with a
man in a white coat and then chases his small son. The boy
looks up at him and asks,‘Papa, is this the end of the world?’

Gorchakov returns to the hotel, to find Eugenia drying

her hair on his bed. Her frustrations at being unable to
interest Gorchakov result in a hysterical outburst, at the end
of which she tells him to go back to his wife and slaps him,
causing his nose to bleed. On her way out of the hotel with

1 6 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 165

her case, she stops to read a letter written by Sosnovsky in
Italy about his homesickness.

Gorchakov, his nose still bleeding, lies down.We then see,

in sepia, shots of his home in Russia, then in voice-over he
reads Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem, ‘As a child I once fell ill’.

Gorchakov wades through a flooded, ruined church. He

gets drunk on vodka and talks to a little girl who appears in
the church. Another poem, ‘Sight grows dim’, is read in
voice-over. Gorchakov is seen lying on a wall next to the
nearly empty vodka bottle; the book of poems is burning.

A sepia sequence shows Gorchakov in a street littered

with rubbish. He goes up to a cupboard that has a mirror on
its door. He sees Domenico’s reflection instead of his own.

In black and white, Gorchakov walks through a ruined

abbey. In voice-over, St Catherine asks God why He doesn’t
make Himself known to Gorchakov. God replies that He
does, but Gorchakov is unaware of His presence.

We cut back to colour, and Gorchakov lying by the now-

burnt stub of the book of poems.

Gorchakov waits for his taxi at the hotel. He is told there

is a phone call for him. It is Eugenia. She tells him that she
is going to India with her new boyfriend and that Domenico
is in Rome, taking part in some kind of demonstration.
Domenico asked her whether Gorchakov had done what he
had asked him to do.When the taxi arrives, Gorchakov tells
the driver not to go to the airport, but to St Catherine’s
Pool.

Domenico, standing atop the equestrian statue of Marcus

Aurelius in Rome, gives a speech to a crowd, which is made
up largely of what appears to be inmates from a psychiatric
hospital. His words are a call for a new way of living and the
establishment of a new world.

Gorchakov arrives at the pool, which has been drained. A

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 166

woman is cleaning it out and places the various objects
retrieved from the pool – a bottle, a broken doll, an old lamp
– on the parapet surrounding it. Gorchakov swallows a pill.

Domenico’s speech reaches its climax; he calls for music.

A man runs across the piazza with a tape recorder. A petrol
can is passed up to Domenico, who empties its contents all
over himself. He sets fire to himself and falls from the statue
as the tape recorder plays a snatch of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy
before it breaks down completely, leaving Domenico’s
screams the only sound that can be heard. He crawls a short
distance, then dies.

Back at St Catherine’s Pool, Gorchakov attempts to carry

the lighted candle across the pool. The wind blows it out
halfway across and he starts again.The wind blows it out for
a second time. Gorchakov makes a third attempt. This time
he makes it, and places the candle on a ledge at the far end
of the pool.The Verdi is heard again on the soundtrack, while
Gorchakov collapses and dies off-screen. A man comes
running across the pool, while the woman who had been
cleaning the pool looks on.

A sepia shot of Gorchakov’s son and his wife (although we

do not see her face).

A black and white shot of the dacha. The camera pulls

back to reveal that the house stands inside a ruined Italian
cathedral. Gorchakov and the dog are seen sitting by a pool.
It begins to snow.

A caption appears, dedicating the film to Tarkovsky’s

mother.

Production History

The English version of Tarkovsky’s diaries charts the devel-
opment of Nostalgia better than any of his other projects.The

1 6 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 167

film grew out of Tempo di Viaggio, which Tarkovksy had been
planning as far back as 1976 (see the ‘Works in Other Media’
chapter).While in Italy in April 1979,Tarkovsky noted down
an idea for a screenplay idea entitled ‘The End of the World’,
in which a man, believing the apocalypse to be imminent,
incarcerates his family for 40 years.They are eventually found
by the authorities and taken away. As they are being helped
into an ambulance, the man’s small son asks him ‘Papa, is this
the end of the world?’

181

By this time, Tarkovsky had also

sketched out the ‘Voice of God’ scene.

182

By 17 July 1979,

the title, Nostalgia, had been decided upon, and Tarkovsky
knew that the hero would be a translator (a musicologist and
poet in the final film) and that the themes of the film would
be ‘Loneliness. Giotto, Assisi. He doesn’t notice anything and
doesn’t look at anything.’

183

By the last week of July,

Tarkovsky and his co-writer, Tonino Guerra, were incorpo-
rating ‘The End of the World’ into Nostalgia, while Tarkovsky
was pondering the reason for hero’s journey to Italy.

184

would seem that they did not stumble upon the idea of
Gorchakov, the film’s protagonist, going to Italy to research
the Russian serf composer Maxim Berezovsky (c.1745–77)
until the following spring, as Berezovsky is not mentioned in
the diary until 27 May 1980.

185

If Gorchakov was not noticing the beauties of Italy,

Tarkovsky evidently soaked up the country himself: ‘We did
some shooting [for Tempo di Viaggio].The ‘goat pass’ in Pozzo
d’Antullo, next to Collepardo, and a little monastery, the
church at Dituralti, and the chemist’s shop, which is old and
astonishingly beautiful… The situation and the view are
unbelievable.’

186

A few days later he notes, ‘Harvested corn

fields with burnt stubble. Black hills, with trees scattered over
the black fields. Straw burning on the fields.’

187

Diary entries

for the summer of 1979 show Tarkovsky in good spirits, and

S E A N M A RT I N

1 6 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 168

working well: ‘In less than two months we have written a
screenplay [Nostalgia], done a scaletta [shooting script] of the
second draft, worked out how we are going to work on ‘The
End of the World’ [Nostalgia] and filmed the ‘Special’ [Tempo
di Viaggio]. Unbelievable! That’s the way to live! Working
with sheer delight.’

188

Tarkovsky returned to Italy in April 1980. Tempo di Viaggio

and the script for Nostalgia were both completed at this time,
with negotiations to make Nostalgia getting under way. RAI,
which had put up the money for the documentary, asked
Tarkovsky to cut the budget, which he was reluctantly forced
to do. By the time Tarkovsky returned to Moscow in August,
the budget had been cut, with Tarkovsky scrapping all the
studio scenes. Everything would have to be shot on location.

After more than a year of delays,Tarkovsky was allowed to

return to Italy in March 1982. The part of Gorchakov had
been written for Anatoly Solonitsyn, but he was by this time
too ill to take the role.Tarkovsky then offered it to Alexander
Kaidanovsky, who accepted, but was not allowed to travel
abroad.Tarkovsky was finally able to secure Oleg Yankovsky
– who had played the role of the father in Mirror – for the
part.

The film was shot in the autumn and was completed in

time for the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. The screening
turned out to be another scandal, with the festival jury
wanting to give Tarkovsky the Palme d’Or, but the official
Russian delegation, led by veteran director Sergei
Bondarchuk, worked overtime to persuade the jury not to
give Tarkovsky the prize. Instead, Tarkovsky shared a new
prize invented for the occasion, the Grand Prix de Création,
with Robert Bresson, whose film L’Argent was also in
competition.

1 6 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 169

A Great Park Filled with Statues

‘I wanted to make a film about Russian nostalgia,’Tarkovsky
wrote in Sculpting in Time,‘about the particular state of mind
which assails Russians who are far from their native land.’

189

However, Tarkovsky’s reasons for being far from his native
land are intimately bound up with his feelings about the
impossibility of continuing to live and work in it. Hence
Nostalgia is, in many respects, not just a film about nostalgia
for the past, but also of the search for home and a place of
belonging on a wider scale.

Nostalgia continues Tarkovsky’s refining of his new

minimal style that had begun in Stalker. The film is domi-
nated by slow camera movements and spartan art direction
(made all the more remarkable by the fact that the whole
film was shot in found locations). In many respects, it is
Tarkovsky’s most ‘minimal’ film all round: it is essentially a
three-hander revolving around the characters of Gorchakov
(a supremely world-weary Oleg Yankovsky); his strained rela-
tionship with his interpreter, Eugenia; and the mad recluse
Domenico. These latter two characters are played by
newcomers to Tarkovsky’s films, Domiziani Giordano and
Erland Josephson. New actors often represent new feelings
or new themes in Tarkovsky, and Giordano and Josephson are
no exception. Although Eugenia starts out as being one of a
number of unsympathetic or remote women in Tarkovsky’s
films (one thinks of the rich doctor’s wife and Liza from
Mirror), her fieriness and independence are something new
(perhaps attributable to Tarkovsky’s co-writer, Tonino
Guerra). Domenico, although a man of faith like Stalker,
differs from the earlier character in that he is not just a man
of sorrows, but also a man of action, ready to take drastic
steps to redeem a world heading for the abyss.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 7 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 170

The plot – never a foremost concern of Tarkovsky’s – is

also minimal and quickly thwarts any sense of traditional
dramatic development. It is as if Tarkovsky is heeding the
advice of Robert Bresson in this film – more so than in any
of his previous work – ‘Be sure of having used to the full all
that is communicated by immobility and silence.’

190

If Stalker

was one of the great films of silence, then Nostalgia is one of
the great films of immobility: Gorchakov, in particular, is
frequently photographed standing still, turning to look into
the camera, or sitting facing away and turning back. This
static quality of the film, together with Yankovsky’s enig-
matic, tired gazes into the camera, draws the viewer in and
implies complicity with what is happening on screen.
Through this technique, Tarkovsky deepens the film, rather
than extending it in the linear sense of a forward-moving
plot, calling to mind a statement he once made in his diary:
‘in the end it is important to confine yourself within a
framework that will deepen your world, not impoverish
it’.

191

Immobility is, in fact, an element that does more than

deepen the film. Sosnovsky’s letter, describing a dream in
which he is a statue in a park, is the meeting place of the
film’s concerns: Russia and Italy, past and present.These ideas
suffuse the characters themselves. Russia appears in
Gorchakov’s dreams, as well as being embodied in the person
of his wife, Maria. She is contrasted with Eugenia, who
represents the attractions of Italy (although her apparent
shallowness and Tarkovsky’s showing of Italy as a strangely
deserted, austere place temper her attractiveness). Gorchakov
himself is contrasted with Domenico, who, although Italian,
represents the redemption theme. Gorchakov’s identification
with the recluse becomes the way out of his personal crisis,
and also unifies the film: Russia and Italy, the past and the

1 7 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 171

present, madness and sanity, faithlessness and the rediscovery
of faith are all embodied in Gorchakov by the time he fulfils
his promise to Domenico to carry the candle across St
Catherine’s Pool.

The Dreams

Doubling is one of Nostalgia’s cornerstones, and one of the
main instances of this technique is in the dream sequences,
which differ from those in the previous films in a number
of interesting ways. Tarkovsky’s colour coding in the past
had been inconsistent. In Andrei Rublev and Stalker, colour
signifies a mysterious, living reality, with black and white
being reserved for the mundane. In Solaris and Mirror, the
use of monochrome sequences seems largely to have been
the result of insufficient colour stock; as a result, the colour
coding of those films is rather arbitrary. In Nostalgia,
however, black and white is reserved solely for memories
and dreams. The one small exception to this rule is when
Domenico’s son looks into the camera and asks,‘Papa, is this
the end of the world?’ That this has been shot in colour
brings it onto the same plane as the external plot of the
film, and suggests that, for Domenico, and perhaps later for
Gorchakov as well, apocalypse is not something that is
merely a dream or fantasy, but something that has already
begun. Colour makes this short dream active in the sense
that it seems to be as real as the waking world, a world it has
the ability to affect.

Tarkovsky had used this device before, most memorably

in Mirror, where the characters seem to be able to ‘see’ the
past and the newsreel sequences, and uses it again to great
effect throughout Nostalgia. When Gorchakov and Eugenia
are talking in the darkness of the hotel lobby near the begin-

S E A N M A RT I N

1 7 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 172

ning of the film, the sound of running water can be heard.
Gorchakov looks over his shoulder, almost back towards the
camera as if he has heard the water; we then cut to a brief
sepia shot of Maria cleaning a wine glass. At the end of the
scene, when the hotelier appears, Eugenia asks Gorchakov if
she has the keys to the other hotel. He replies that they are
the keys to his house back home. Gorchakov walks towards
the camera and the running water can be heard again. He
looks into the camera; we cut to the sepia shot of Maria
again, only this time she is looking at the camera as well and
smiling, almost as if she has seen Gorchakov. She turns away
and the camera tracks right to reveal the dacha and the chil-
dren playing with the dog.

When Gorchakov falls asleep on his bed, we cut to a sepia

sequence showing Maria comforting Eugenia, who, when
we first see her, is looking off-screen to the right, as if she is
looking at Gorchakov as he slumbers. The scene changes to
show a pregnant Maria supine on what appears to be
Gorchakov’s hotel bed. Gorchakov leaves her, and she turns
towards the camera and calls his name. As the lighting
changes and the image fades – making her appear almost to
be levitating over the hotel bed – we hear Eugenia calling for
Gorchakov from outside in the corridor.

Another interesting feature of this first dream sequence is

the role of Domenico’s dog, which trots out of the bathroom
to settle by the side of the bed only shortly after Gorchakov
has lain down. Here the dog, like the one in Stalker, acts as a
mediator between two worlds – in this case the world of
Gorchakov’s imagination and the ‘real world’ in which
Gorchakov (as well as Domenico) will ultimately make his
decisive act. But what is interesting here is that the dog is not
shown in sepia, as it sometimes is in Stalker. Here, the dream
walks right into the room, suggesting the possible influence

1 7 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 173

of the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who often used
the same technique.

192

After Sosnovsky’s letter has been read, Gorchakov lies

down in one of the hotel’s corridors nursing the bloody nose
that Eugenia has given him. We then cut to a sepia shot of
Maria in bed. We can hear Gorchakov call her name gently.
She seems to hear, waking up and rising to draw back the
curtains.This leads into one of the most beautiful shots in the
film, a track showing Maria, their son and the two other
women

193

in two incompatible spaces outside the dacha as a

radio plays on the soundtrack. At the end of the shot, the
moon rises over the dacha. We then cut back to the hotel,
where we hear Maria calling for Gorchakov again. He looks
into the camera, as though he can hear her.

The sepia sequences associated with Domenico likewise

seem to be in communication with the sequences in full
colour. Upon entering Domenico’s house, Gorchakov seems
to see a diorama beneath a window.This is shot in sepia and,
oddly enough, the artificial landscape on the floor seems
more ‘real’ than the view out of the window.The diorama is
the microcosm to the macrocosm outside, suggesting that the
drama that took place in Domenico’s house is being played
out in the wider world. When Gorchakov leaves the house,
it is intercut with sepia shots of the liberation of Domenico’s
family after their seven years’ incarceration in such a way as
to suggest that either Domenico is remembering it as he
shows Gorchakov to his taxi, or that Gorchakov is trying to
picture the scene as he leaves. The final sequence involving
the two men is perhaps the most crucial. After getting drunk
in the flooded church, Gorchakov dreams of or envisions
himself in a deserted, littered street. The debris in the street
suggests war, or some other epochal crisis. He passes an
abandoned cupboard and stops, looking back. At this point

S E A N M A RT I N

1 7 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 174

we hear Gorchakov speaking lines that could have been said
by Domenico ‘My God, why did I do it? They’re my chil-
dren, my family, my own flesh and blood.’ Looking into the
mirror on the cupboard door, Gorchakov is met not with his
own reflection, but Domenico’s. Their merging is now
complete.This sequence, and all the preceding sepia sections,
suggests that the real drama of Nostalgia is internal, not
external.

The Search for Home

Nostalgia is Tarkovsky’s most ‘internal’ film after Mirror, and it
is in some respects a companion piece to the earlier film. If
Mirror is Tarkovsky’s own ‘in search of lost time’, then
Nostalgia is a quest for a lost homeland or place that is both
actual and metaphorical. It is Tarkovsky’s most eloquent
depiction of alienation.

Gorchakov is adrift from the very beginning of the film.

At the pool, he doesn’t know what time of day it is (rather
like Alexei not knowing what time of day it is when he talks
to his mother in Mirror), and he and Eugenia face away from
each other when talking both there and in the darkness of
the hotel. They don’t so much as engage in dialogue, but
rather deliver monologues. In fact, the whole film could be
interpreted as Gorchakov’s interior monologue. Real
communication seems to be possible only in the sphere of
actions, not words.

Unlike Stalker, where space was frequently enigmatic,

time is puzzling in Nostalgia, adding to the sense of
Gorchakov’s dislocation. It is difficult to tell over how many
days the film takes place. It could be one or two, with the day
of Domenico’s protest and the candle scene taking place a
few days or weeks later, but Tarkovsky keeps the time period

1 7 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 175

vague. Nature, too, is depicted in such a way as to make it
seem cold. Stone dominates, with Tarkovsky indulging his
love of old walls and ruins. His appreciation for the Japanese
concept of saba – or ‘natural rustiness’ – suggests that both
Gorchakov and Eugenia have lost contact with nature, for,
although the many walls are worn and lichen-covered, they
are beautiful in terms of saba (age and wear being seen as
inherently desirable), a fact which seems to be lost on the
characters.

194

Estrangement from nature – both our own and that of our

surroundings – is perhaps the ultimate theme of the film, for,
during the final 20 or so minutes, Tarkovsky moves away
from mere nostalgia for home to address this global problem.
As Peter Green has noted, ‘To limit the identity of these
yearnings [of nostalgia] specifically to Russia would be to
reduce the dimensions of the film. For, on the one hand, loss
of habitat has now become a worldwide ecological problem,
with man fast destroying his own natural environment; and
on the other, home is also a place within the heart.’

195

Domenico’s despair is clearly Tarkovsky’s: ‘The eyes of all
mankind are looking at the pit into which we are all
plunging,’ Domenico declaims during his speech in Rome.
‘It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the
verge of ruin.’ He suggests that the only way to salvation is
for ‘Great things [to] end, small things [to] endure… Just
look at nature and you’ll see that life is simple, that we must
go back to where we were, to the point where you took the
wrong turning.’ He then acknowledges the near-futility of
his protest and also makes a comment that calls up the
images of the filthy chemical water in Stalker: ‘We must go
back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the
water. What kind of a world is this if a madman has to tell
you to be ashamed of yourselves?’

S E A N M A RT I N

1 7 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 176

In the context of Domenico’s protest, the final sequence

in St Catherine’s Pool takes on a redeeming significance.
That Gorchakov might finally do something has been hinted
at earlier, when he tells Eugenia that he thinks he knows
why Domenico locked up his family. His dream of St
Catherine imploring the Almighty to make Himself known
to Gorchakov suggests that the Russian is yearning for salva-
tion. In a daring sequence worthy of the men sitting outside
the Room in Stalker,Tarkovsky’s camera patiently follows the
ailing Gorchakov across the pool with the candle in an
unbroken take lasting nearly nine minutes. Twice the wind
blows it out. He nearly trips. His breathing, prominent in the
mix, accentuates his inner struggle to be redeemed and
reborn. It is this scene that Krzysztof Kies´lowski described as
a ‘miracle’, for, by the time Gorchakov reaches the far end of
the pool, the candle he is carrying is no longer just a candle.

‘A spectacle of unrelieved gloom.’

When Tarkovsky finally saw the material he had shot,
however, he noted with surprise that it was ‘a spectacle of
unrelieved gloom.’

196

He goes on to explain that gloom had

not been his intention: ‘I had been worn down by my sepa-
ration from my family and from the way of life that I was
used to, by working under quite unfamiliar conditions, even
by using a foreign language.’

197

In the process of negotiating

to live and work in Italy, during which time the Soviet
authorities refused to allow Tarkovsky’s young son to join
him, the director’s own experience began to inform the film:
‘irrespective of my own theoretical intentions, the camera
was obeying first and foremost my inner state during
filming.’

198

Russia and Tarkovsky’s own life are present in the

film in the monochrome sequences; in Gorchakov’s reading

1 7 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 177

of Arseny’s poems; in the ‘Moonrise’ scene, which was based
on Tarkovsky’s own moon-watching of 15 September
1976

199

; in the fact that Gorchakov and Tarkovsky’s father

are poets; that he shares the same first name as Tarkovsky
himself; and that his surname harks back to Tarkovsky’s
childhood – the dacha in Ignatievo where the Tarkovskys
summered during the mid-1930s, and which was recreated
in Mirror, was owned by the Gorchakov family. ‘It could
never have occurred to me when I started shooting,’
Tarkovsky wrote,‘that my own, all too specific, nostalgia, was
soon to take possession of my soul forever.’

200

After failing to

get reassurance from the Soviet leader,Yuri Andropov, that he
would be given work if he returned home, Tarkovsky
announced his decision to remain in the West, elevating
Nostalgia from premonition to prophecy.

S E A N M A RT I N

1 7 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 178

The Sacrifice (1986)

R I P T Y C H

I I I

Alternate Titles:

Offret (Swedish Title), Sacrificatio

Production Company:

Swedish Film Institute

(Stockholm)/Argos Films (Paris); in association with
FilmFour International, Josephson & Nykvist, Sveriges
Television/SVT2, Sandrew Film & Teater; with the partici-
pation of the French Ministry of Culture
Executive Producer:

Anna-Lena Wibom

Producer:

Katinka Faragò

Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Director of Photography:

Sven Nykvist

Editor:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Michal Leszczylowski

Assistant Director:

Kerstin Eriksdottir

Music:

JS Bach: St Matthew Passion BWV 244, No.47,

‘Ebarme dich’; Japanese and Swedish Folk Music
Art Director:

Anna Asp

Special Effects:

Svenska Stuntgruppen, Lars Höglund, Lars

Palmqvist
Costumes:

Inger Pehrsson

Make-Up:

Kjell Gustavsson, Florence Fouquier

Sound:

Owe Svensson

1 7 9

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 179

Cast:

Erland Josephson (Alexander), Susan Fleetwood

(Adelaide), Valérie Mairesse (Julia), Allan Edwall (Otto),
Gudrún Gísladóttir (Maria), Sven Wolter (Victor), Fillipa
Franzén (Marta), Tommy Kjellqvist (Little Man), Per
Kallman,Tommy Nordahl (Ambulancemen)
Shot:

April–July 1985

Running Time:

149 mins

First Screening:

Paris, April 1986 (preview); Cannes, May

1986 (Official Premiere)
First Screening in USSR:

April 1987

Release in West:

1986/87

Awards:

Grand Prix, FIPRESCI Prize, Special Jury Prize,

Best Artistic Contribution (Sven Nykvist), Cannes Film
Festival 1986; Best Film,Valladolid Film Festival 1986; British
Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film 1987

Storyline

The credits roll over a close-up of Leonardo’s Adoration of the
Magi to Bach’s ‘Ebarme Dich’. The Bach is replaced by the
sounds of seabirds and waves. The camera holds on the
Leonardo after the credits have ended.

Alexander is watering a skeletal tree on the seashore with

his young son, Little Man, and telling him the story of a
monk who watered a dead tree every day until it finally
flowered. Alexander speculates on changing the world
through simple rituals.

Otto the postman cycles up and presents Alexander with

a birthday telegram. They walk inland, Otto chiding
Alexander for being gloomy. He tells Alexander that he
shouldn’t be waiting for ‘something real’ to happen to him.
They discuss Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return and the
nature of belief. Otto quotes Mark 11:24. He falls off his

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 180

bicycle, which Little Man has tied to a bush.

Alexander and Little Man continue their walk in a grove

of trees. As Adelaide (his wife) and Victor (the family doctor
and possibly Adelaide’s lover) arrive in a car, Alexander is
musing that humanity has taken the wrong turning. Victor
quizzes Adelaide about Alexander’s state of mental health, to
which she replies that he is all right, but has been working a
lot lately.Victor congratulates Alexander on his birthday and
tells Little Man that he will be talking within a week. (The
boy is forbidden to speak due to an operation on his vocal
chords.) Adelaide and Victor drive back to the house.

Alexander continues to soliloquise. Man has violated

nature and has built a society governed by fear and power.
There is a dreadful disharmony between our material and
spiritual development; savages are more spiritual than we are.
Our civilisation is built on sin, or that which is unnecessary.
He then says he is fed up with talk – quoting Hamlet’s
‘Words, words, words’ – and wishes somebody would do
something.A shepherdess’s call is heard;Alexander falls to the
ground.

In black and white, we see a deserted, littered street.
Back at the house, Alexander leafs through a book of

icons. He thanks Victor for the birthday present.Their talk is
interrupted by the arrival of Marta, apparently Alexander’s
daughter,

201

who can remember Alexander’s time as an

actor. Adelaide joins them, regretting that Alexander gave up
acting. Alexander explains his dislike of acting. Victor tells
him that he is thinking of emigrating to Australia. Adelaide
and Marta both see someone approaching the house.

Otto arrives with a large, framed seventeenth-century

map of Europe, his present for Alexander. Otto tells Victor
that he has lived in the area for only two months; before that,
he was a schoolmaster.

1 8 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 181

One of the maids, Maria, enters and asks Adelaide if she

can go. Adelaide gives her three final tasks to do. Otto tells
Victor that Maria, who is originally from Iceland, lives near
him and that they are ‘acquainted’. Alexander says he finds
Maria ‘very odd’, while Adelaide confides that sometimes
Maria scares her.

Alexander goes to look for Little Man. Otto tells everyone

– at Victor’s behest – of his interest in paranormal
phenomena. He cites the case of a young soldier who
appeared alongside his mother in a photograph taken 20
years after he died. He suddenly collapses at the end of his
account. Recovering, he says that an ‘evil angel’ touched
him, but he is OK.

Outside, Maria can be seen walking towards the house.

Back inside, the wine glasses tremble as military jets fly over-
head. Everyone runs to the windows to look. A jug of milk
falls from a shelf.

Outside, in the first of the film’s extremely pale, washed-

out scenes, Alexander finds an exact miniature replica of the
house. He mutters lines from Macbeth. Maria appears and
tells him that Little Man made the model (with Otto’s help),
as a birthday present.

The Leonardo reappears. Alexander and Otto are heard

discussing it. We are now shown that a reproduction hangs
on the wall of Alexander’s study.We can then hear fragments
of a TV broadcast coming from downstairs about a crisis
involving the army.

Downstairs, everyone is gathered around the TV. The

news is grave: what appears to be a World War has just
started. The scene alternates between black and white,
normal colour and muted colour. Alexander admits that he
has been waiting his whole life for this; Adelaide demands
that someone ‘do something’. She becomes hysterical, so

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 182

Victor sedates her. He also sedates Marta against her wishes,
but Julia, the other maid, refuses.

Alexander goes outside. Otto tries the phone; it’s dead.

Adelaide gives a monologue in which she admits that she
married the wrong man. They agree to stay put rather than
go north. Adelaide decides they should eat dinner and asks
Julia to wake Little Man. She refuses, saying it would only
lead to the boy becoming frightened.

Alexander notices a gun in Victor’s doctor’s bag. He calls

in on Little Man, who pretends to be asleep. Alexander then
goes into his study and prays that if God will restore things
to how they were that morning, he will sacrifice all he holds
dear, destroy his home, give up Little Man and never speak
again. He then crawls to the sofa and lies down.

The shepherdess’s call is heard again, as Marta, in her

room, calls for Victor and disrobes.

In black and white, we see Alexander

202

running away

down a corridor, followed by a shot of him sitting in a chair,
looking towards the window. Maria’s house can be seen
through it, and Alexander reappears outside. He walks
through mud, bending to pull up a root. He wanders around
in a snowy landscape with houses, trees and a statue. The
camera tracks over dead leaves, mulch, dropped coins. He calls
for Little Man, of whom only his feet can be seen, before he
runs off. Jets fly overhead. Alexander wakes with a start.

Otto calls on him, accessing the study via a ladder. He tells

Alexander that there is still one last chance: he must sleep
with Maria who, he says, is a witch. Alexander goes down-
stairs and takes Victor’s gun. Adelaide, Victor and Marta are
dining outside.Alexander sneaks past and cycles off on Otto’s
bike. He falls off and is about to turn back when the shep-
herdess’s call comes again, which this time he seems to hear.
He gets back on and continues his journey.

1 8 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 183

Maria welcomes Alexander into her home. She washes his

hands, after which he plays a piece of music on an organ. He
rambles incoherently about how he once tried unsuccessfully
to improve his mother’s garden, before pulling out the gun
and putting it to his temple, begging Maria to love him.The
jets roar overhead again. Alexander and Maria embrace, then
rise up above Maria’s bed.

We see the littered street again, this time full of people

running in panic. On the soundtrack, a woman consoles
Alexander, asking him why he is so frightened.

203

The

camera pans down to reveal Little Man asleep.

Alexander sleeps on a camp bed.Adelaide is with him. She

turns to face him, and we can see that it is Maria, wearing
Adelaide’s clothes.

Back in colour, Marta, naked, chases chickens through the

house. The camera tracks past Adelaide into Alexander’s
study, where he is still asleep on the couch.

204

He wakes up,

slowly realising that things are back to normal. He calls his
publishers, who tell him ‘you can’t imagine what things are
like here today’. He puts on a robe and, in tears, goes down-
stairs.

Adelaide, Victor and Marta are having breakfast outside,

discussing Victor’s plans to move to Australia. Marta finds a
note from Alexander, asking them all to go on a walk.
Alexander watches them go.

He moves the cars away from the house, then piles chairs

up in the porch, covering them with a tablecloth. He sets
light to the cloth and watches the house burn as Adelaide,
Victor, Marta and Julia run towards him. Alexander tries to
evade them, running towards Maria, who has now appeared.
Adelaide threatens Maria, who backs off.Adelaide and Victor
lead Alexander to an ambulance as Otto cycles up.

They chase Alexander, who finally gets into the ambu-

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 184

lance of his own accord. The ambulance takes him away as
Maria commandeers Otto’s bicycle and heads off in the
opposite direction. The remains of the burning house
collapse.

Little Man is at the tree, watering it.The shepherdess’s call

can be heard again. Maria cycles up to see the ambulance
drive past. The Bach piece fades in. Little Man lies down
beneath the tree and speaks for the first time. ‘In the begin-
ning was the Word.Why is that, Papa?’

The camera cranes up the tree until it reaches the top

branches. The shot holds, and a caption appears dedicating
the film to Tarkovsky’s son ‘with hope and confidence’.

Production History

Tarkovsky began what was to become his final film in late
1980. Again, as with Nostalgia, it would mirror Tarkovsky’s
own life without him being conscious of it, at least initially.
‘The Witch’, a script that he was contemplating writing in
1980/81 with Arkady Strugatsky, was to have been about a
wealthy man who is cured of cancer after spending a night
with a witch. Many years later, the witch appears outside the
man’s house and he gives up his family and possessions to go
off and live with her.Tarkovsky signed the contract to make
the film at Cannes in 1983, when it was still called ‘The
Witch’, but at some point the hero’s cancer was replaced
with the outbreak of a nuclear conflict. The character of
Maria, the witch, remained, although Tarkovsky changed the
title to The Sacrifice when he realised that the word ‘witch’ –
in Russian derived from the verb ‘to know’ – did not have
the same connotations in other languages.

205

The film was shot in Sweden in the spring and early

summer of 1985. Although Tarkovsky initially had a some-

1 8 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 185

what frosty relationship with his cameraman, Sven Nykvist,
the two men developed a close working relationship. But
even Nykvist’s considerable skills couldn’t prevent the
cameras jamming during the shooting of the house burning
down.The set had to be rebuilt, with the scene being re-shot
on the morning of the last day of principal photography.

The film was completed in January 1986. By this time,

Tarkovsky was bedridden, and editing meetings were held in
his hospital room. The film’s first public screening was at
Cannes, where it was given the Grand Prix and the Special
Jury Prize.

A Dreadful Disharmony

Tarkovsky’s last film is the summation of the themes begun
in Stalker, and which continued through Nostalgia. The
Sacrifice is the closing chapter in Tarkovsky’s triptych and, like
the two preceding films, it is driven by a sense of desperation
about the state of the world. Perhaps intuiting that it would
be his last film, Tarkovsky uses the film to settle accounts
with the modern world and, as such, The Sacrifice has the
unmistakable air of being a last testament. It also goes further
than any of his other films in exploring the tension between
the outer and inner worlds, and much of the film takes place
in a world which seems to be simultaneously a dream and
also real.Tarkovsky admitted that the film’s events had more
than one level of meaning, describing The Sacrifice as a
parable.

Tarkovsky explains his reasons for making the film in

Sculpting in Time. He notes ‘the more clearly I discerned the
stamp of materialism on the face of our planet… the more I
came up against unhappy people’ who were suffering from
the ‘inability or unwillingness to see why life had lost all

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 186

delight and all value, why it had become oppressive’, the
more committed Tarkovsky became to making the film,
describing it as ‘the most important thing in my life’. For
Tarkovsky, the problem that confronts us is that we have
acquired ‘a dreadful disharmony’,

206

as Alexander says in the

film. ‘It seems to me that the individual stands today at a
crossroads,’ Tarkovsky continues, ‘faced with the choice of
whether to pursue the existence of a blind consumer, subject
to the implacable march of new technology and the endless
multiplication of material goods, or whether to seek out a
way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, which ultimately
might mean not only his personal salvation but also the
saving of society at large.’

Such sentiments are clearly echoed by Alexander in the

film. He is portrayed from the opening as something of a
philosopher, musing on the story of a monk who watered a
dead tree every day until it blossomed, as he himself plants a
tree by the water’s edge. When he is alone with Little Man
in the next scene, he launches into a monologue deploring
the state of the world. In many respects, this follows on from
Domenico’s speech in Nostalgia (both characters are played
by Erland Josephson), but whereas Domenico was poetic and
allusive,Alexander is prosaic and direct:‘[Man] has constantly
violated nature. The result is a civilisation built on force,
power, fear, dependence. All of our “technical progress” has
only provided us with comfort… savages are more spiritual
than we are… As soon as we make a scientific breakthrough,
we put it to use in the service of evil… some wise man

207

once said that sin is that which is unnecessary. If that is so,
then our entire civilisation is built on sin, from beginning to
end.We have acquired a dreadful disharmony… between our
material and our spiritual development.’

With this speech, Tarkovsky could not be nailing his

1 8 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 187

colours to the mast any more explicitly. He clearly felt that
the state of the world is so dire that sermonising was called
for in order to get his urgent message across. What is so
extraordinary, though, about this scene is what we see when
Alexander is talking: Little Man, exploring on all fours the
little copse where they are, followed by a shot that simply
shows the wind blowing through the grass. It is one of the
most elegantly uncomplicated, almost Zen-like, moments in
all of Tarkovsky. Is this what our ‘dreadful disharmony’ has
robbed us of, the ability to appreciate something as simple as
this? Is Alexander even aware of it? Tarkovsky, as ever, lets us
make up our own minds.

Otto is the character who precipitates Alexander into

action. He is first seen delivering a birthday telegram to
Alexander, and chides him for being so gloomy, as if he were
yearning for something, or waiting. Otto admits to having
the feeling that he has spent his whole life waiting for some-
thing real to happen to him. This seems to spur Alexander
on, as in the next scene, when he is alone with Little Man,
he reproaches himself for his monologue and says ‘If only
someone could stop talking and do something instead!’ This
sets up an expectation that when something does happen,
Alexander will be ready to act. When the news comes that
the missiles are in the air, he says to himself, ‘I’ve waited for
this all my life.’ Realising that words are useless, Alexander
now has only one course of action left open to him: he must
do something.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

The Sacrifice uses colour in much the same way as Nostalgia.
Full colour is used for everyday life, with black and white
being reserved for dreams or visions. There are three main

S E A N M A RT I N

1 8 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 188

monochrome sequences in the film: the two shots of the city
street,

208

which would appear to be a vision (or even a flash-

forward); and Alexander’s dream of trying to find Little Man
in the snow. However, much of the film’s central section
takes place during one of Scandinavia’s ‘white nights’, and
the colour in this section is very muted.

209

Is this part of the

film therefore a dream, or real? Has nuclear war actually
broken out, or is it all in Alexander’s head? Or even one of
the other characters, such as Little Man?

The film’s colour coding is made even more problematic,

as some of the central section is photographed in something
close to full colour, such as the scene where the family watch
the television broadcast about the outbreak of hostilities, and
the two scenes were Marta appears naked. The second of
these scenes, where she chases hens down a previously
unseen corridor in the house, would seem to be happening
on the same plane or level of consciousness as the preceding
section, the monochrome shot of the city street full of
people, but the first is extremely ambiguous.

So subtle, however, is Tarkovsky’s use of colour that these

issues are perhaps not, on first viewing, the film’s most
noticeable difficulties. A more obvious hurdle is in the very
nature of Alexander’s sacrifice itself. During his prayer, he
vows to ‘give Thee all I have. I’ll give up my family, whom I
love. I’ll destroy my home and give up Little Man. I’ll be
mute, and never speak another word to anyone. I will relin-
quish everything that binds me to life if only Thou dost
restore everything as it was before, as it was this morning and
yesterday. Just let me be rid of this deadly sickening animal
fear!’ In due course,Alexander does indeed destroy his home,
but can it really be a sacrifice if it involves other people? In
other words, it is not simply his own home that Alexander is
destroying, but also that of his family. Furthermore, he is also

1 8 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 189

depriving Little Man of a father. Is it really a sacrifice when
he is inflicting such things on people he loves, his own
family?

If Alexander’s final action is therefore controversial, the

events that lead up to the film’s climax are likewise prob-
lematic. As we have noted, Alexander prays after he has
watched the TV broadcast. Given that he admits to Otto at
the beginning of the film that his relationship with God is
‘non-existent’, it is remarkable that he prays at all. But what
follows is even more peculiar. After his prayer, he seems to
fall into a doze on the couch and what is possibly a dream
sequence follows, in which Marta offers herself to Victor.The
dream of looking for Little Man then follows, with Otto
appearing in Alexander’s study afterwards to explain to
Alexander that his servant Maria is a witch, and that if he
sleeps with her, they will all be saved. Given that, come
morning, everything is ‘as it was this morning and yesterday’,
what has saved them? Is it Alexander’s prayer, or his visit to
Maria’s? Has there even been a war at all?

The key to the film’s ambiguity is the start of the dream,

but Tarkovsky doesn’t let us know when it begins. That
Alexander falls asleep is undeniable: after he prays, he crawls
to the couch and seems to fall into a slumber at once; we
likewise see him waking the next morning. The black and
white sequences are almost certainly dreams or visions, but
as to how much of the colour sequences are,Tarkovsky leaves
us on our own to decide. Recalling the narrative puzzles of
Solaris, The Sacrifice constantly wrong-foots us when we
think we have solved the film.What we are watching seems
to be real – the ominous thunder heard at the beginning of
the film; the jets screaming overhead rattling the wine glasses
and breaking the milk jug; the family’s watching of the
broadcast; Adelaide’s hysterics; Alexander’s praying – but

S E A N M A RT I N

1 9 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 190

there are also things in the film that have an oddness to them,
which suggests that we are now in a dream. Otto’s nocturnal
visit to Alexander is a case in point. ‘What is it? What’s
happened?’ Alexander asks when Otto knocks on the
window. ‘There’s still one last chance!’ the postman replies,
but Alexander doesn’t appear to understand.‘A chance? What
kind of chance?’ One would assume that had the TV broad-
cast and the prayer been real, Alexander would know full
well ‘what’s happened’. To further complicate matters, some-
thing seems to have happened, as the electricity has failed, and
the two men hear the shepherdess’s call. ‘What was that?’
Otto asks. ‘I don’t know,’ Alexander replies. ‘I thought it
sounded like music.’

To cap it all, Alexander, despite the fact that he declares

that Otto’s proposition to go to Maria is madness, does
precisely that. Cycling to the other side of the bay where
Maria lives, he falls off and is about to return to the house
when the shepherdess’s call seems to stop him in his tracks.
This appears to be real, but what about the car that we can
see in this scene? Why would anyone fleeing a supposed
nuclear war abandon their car there, in the middle of
nowhere, of all places?

210

Events at Maria’s do little, if anything, to help matters.

Alexander’s imploring that Maria saves everyone seems real
enough. More jets fly overhead, while Maria’s TV ‘went dead
about 11.00 and didn’t come on again’, suggesting some sort
of power cut. But what of their levitation? Unlike the levi-
tation in Mirror, which takes place after a voice-over,
suggesting that it is an imagined or dreamed episode,
Alexander’s and Maria’s floating above the bed takes place in
real time with the real sounds of their lovemaking.Yet even
this seems to be more real than the two shots that immedi-
ately follow, which show the city street now full of people

1 9 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 191

fleeing the disaster as Little Man sleeps above them, and then
Maria wearing Adelaide’s clothes, watching over Alexander
as he sleeps on a camp bed. Not only have the two women
seemed to merge in identity, but Maria is also seen gazing
towards the remains of the burned-down house (its chimney
stack, all that will remain of it by the end of the film, is
clearly visible beyond the trees).

A more radical interpretation of The Sacrifice might be to

suggest that, apart from the monochrome sequences, there
are no dreams in the film at all.

‘Life as a Reflection, Life as a Dream’

Despite its ambiguities, or maybe even because of them, The
Sacrifice remains an enormously affecting film.The emotional
nakedness of the film is remarkable: the prayer scene is almost
embarrassing to watch, so acutely does Tarkovsky project his
own personal fears into Alexander’s words.Adelaide’s hysteria
is similarly powerful, as is her argument with Julia about
waking Little Man and her monologue to Otto. The film is
arguably the most beautiful of Tarkovsky’s films, with Sven
Nykvist’s camerawork brilliantly capturing the northern
light against which the action unfolds. Tarkovsky quietly
celebrates the human form in showing the actors frequently
full-length in long shots as the characters go about their daily
business, and also nature, specifically the trees outside the
house.

The soundscape is also particularly memorable. The

never-seen shepherdess’s calls act as both the film’s leitmotif
and suggest that the world of the unseen is ever-present.
Likewise, the repeated soft tapping on the window conveys
an air of expectancy or immanent presence. The use of
Leonardo’s Adoration seems to serve a similar purpose, almost

S E A N M A RT I N

1 9 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 192

as if it is a character watching silently as the events of the
night unfold, not judging but patiently reflecting the faces of
Alexander and Otto as they peer into it, or the trees outside,
blowing in the night air.

One could even go as far as to argue that this is what the

film is really about, to ‘capture pure poetic states of soul’,

211

as Mark Le Fanu puts it. In never letting us know what is
dream and what is real, Tarkovsky has found a new way of
showing the world, a perfect example of what Ingmar
Bergman called Tarkovsky’s ability to show ‘life as a reflec-
tion, life as a dream’.

Autobiographical Elements

It is often assumed that Tarkovsky knew he had cancer while
shooting The Sacrifice, which would go some way to
explaining why it comes across as his ‘settling of accounts
with the West’ and has the air of an eleventh-hour sermon.
But as his diaries show, he was not given the diagnosis until
December 1985. Nevertheless, Tarkovsky must have uncon-
sciously known that it would be his last film. His realisation
that it was is noted in a diary entry for 13 December:
‘Pasternak was right’, a reference to the prediction that he
would only make seven films. Unlike Alexander in ‘The
Witch’, there was to be no cure for Tarkovsky’s own cancer,
and he would die just over a year after the original diagnosis,
on 29 December 1986.

Although a number of people, such as the critic David

Robinson of The Times, who visited the set of the film and
attested to Tarkovsky’s good spirits during shooting,

212

The

Sacrifice contains a thinly veiled portrait of his own family
and personal circumstances at the time. Alexander’s family is
modelled on his own, in particular the characters of

1 9 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 193

Adelaide, Marta and Little Man. Adelaide is surely the most
unsympathetic of Tarkovsky’s women; she is also the char-
acter who is most closely modelled on his second wife,
Larissa, whom he was firmly convinced was a witch by the
time the film was shot.

213

(One assumes he meant witch in

its traditional, dark fairy-tale aspect, as opposed to the benign
witches of ‘The Witch’ and the pagan episode in Rublev.)
Adelaide’s flowing dresses, her carefully coiffured hair and
her haughty demeanour are specifically based on Larissa’s
own mannerisms and appearance. One cannot but help
wonder if Adelaide’s confession, delivered to Otto as she lies
on the couch after the sedation has worn off, that she ‘loved
one man but married another’ has any basis in reality also.

If Adelaide could be said to be a woman trapped by mater-

ial needs, Marta is likewise trapped by her overpowering
mother, with whom she competes for Victor’s attentions. It is
not made clear in the film, but Marta is Adelaide’s daughter
from a previous marriage. When Tarkovsky met Larissa in
1965, she already had a five-year-old daughter, Olga, who
would appear in both Solaris and Mirror, and of whom
Tarkovsky was apparently pathologically possessive.
Tarkovsky could have transferred some of his own feelings
for his stepdaughter onto Adelaide, as it is she who is posses-
sive in the film, not Alexander; that Marta appears naked in
the film on two occasions reveals another stratum of
Tarkovsky’s complex relationship with his stepdaughter.

Little Man is Andrei Jr, although in the film he is about

half the age he actually was when The Sacrifice was made (14
years old). Here, the autobiographical element verges on the
theatrical, in that Alexander can talk to Little Man on their
afternoon walks, but Little Man cannot reply, due to a recent
operation on his vocal chords. Likewise, Tarkovsky was not
able to have a ‘normal’ conversation with his son, as Andrei

S E A N M A RT I N

1 9 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 194

Junior had not been allowed out of the Soviet Union. The
authorities had apparently hoped that this situation would
force Tarkovsky to return to Russia, but it did not.Tarkovsky
was as a result dependent on phone calls placed at odd hours
of the day to talk to his son, who was finally allowed to join
his father in January 1986, the month The Sacrifice was
completed.

214

Out of the other characters, Otto the postman deserves a

mention. He suffers a fainting fit (which he ascribes to the
touch of an evil angel), describes his hobby as ‘collecting’
strange events, and then proceeds to tell the family a story
about a soldier who appeared in a photograph next to his
mother, although he had been dead for years. While Otto’s
forebears are such characters as Rublev’s Theophanes the
Greek and Solaris’s Gibarian, who mediate between the
living and the dead, the Stalker, who mediates between the
Zone and the outside world, and Nostalgia’s Domenico, who
mediates between sanity and madness, normal time and
eschatological time, Otto likewise stands between the
normal waking world and the world of Alexander’s dream.
But Otto differs from these other characters in that he seems
to have been based on someone Tarkovsky knew personally
in the Soviet Union. On 7 February 1976, Tarkovsky
mentions going to visit a clairvoyant, whom he then,
correcting himself, describes as a ‘collector’ of psychic
phenomena, as Otto does in the film.

Several other episodes come directly from Tarkovsky’s

own experience.

215

The monologue that Alexander delivers

to Maria when he makes his night-time visit to her house is
based on Tarkovsky’s diary entry for 31 December 1978,
where Tarkovsky mentions an argument about improving
the garden until it became an eyesore.

216

Finally, the decision

Adelaide takes that the family should stay put once the news

1 9 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 195

broadcast has announced that the missiles are in the air seems
to be derived from a rather strange diary entry for September
1975, when a UFO was spotted over Tarkovsky’s dacha at
Myasnoye. Tarkovsky himself was not present (he may have
been inside at the time, working on the script for
Hoffmaniana), but Larissa was, and she told Tarkovsky that the
district prosecutor, who witnessed the object with her, made
a comment as to whether the appearance of the craft
signalled the outbreak of a nuclear war, and remarked that ‘it
would be better to die at home than somewhere on the
road’.

217

Ironically, Tarkovsky was not able to do the same.

He died in a Parisian hospital, far from his adopted home in
Italy, and even further from the land of his birth. But The
Sacrifice is, amongst other things, a call to courage. ‘There is
no such thing as death,’ Alexander tells Little Man, ‘only the
fear of death.’

S E A N M A RT I N

1 9 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 196

Works in Other Media

E L E V I S I O N

Tempo di Viaggio (1980)

Alternate Titles:

Journey In Time (US DVD release)

Literal Title:

A Time of Travel

Production Company:

RAI/Genius

Production Supervisor:

Franco Terilli

Directors:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Tonino Guerra

Screenplay:

Andrei Tarkovsky & Tonino Guerra

Director of Photography:

Luciano Tovoli

Editor:

Franco Letti

Sound:

Eugenio Rondani

Mix:

Romano Checcacci

Unit Photography:

Giancarlo Pancaldi

Cast:

Andrei Tarkovsky (Himself),Tonino Guerra (Himself)

Shot:

July/August 1979

Running Time:

63 minutes

First Screening:

Rome, 9 June 1980 (Industry screening)

First Screening in West:

Italian Television, 1980

Release in West:

February 2003 (DVD release)

1 9 7

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 197

Storyline

The opening credits roll over a black screen in silence. A
view of Rome from the roof terrace of Tonino Guerra’s
apartment. Guerra is shown on the terrace.Tarkovsky arrives;
the two men talk. Tonino recites a new poem to Tarkovsky,
who praises it. They discuss a screenplay they are writing,
only to be interrupted by a phone call from Antonioni. We
see a still life of a birdcage and a book. On the terrace,
Tarkovsky talks of his impressions of Italy.

A flashback shows them visiting a location near Amalfi.

Guerra speaks of his enthusiasm for Lecce, church architec-
ture and whether they should make their protagonist an
architect.Tarkovsky feels that Lecce is ‘too beautiful’ for their
film.They are seen visiting Otranto Cathedral, where a priest
explains the symbolism of a mosaic. A tracking shot from a
car takes us into the town of Locorotondo. A still life of a
bird in a tree. Tarkovsky and Guerra discuss Piero della
Francesca’s Madonna of Childbirth, with Guerra expressing the
view that no reproduction could ever do the painting justice.

Inside the apartment, Tarkovsky talks about his favourite

directors, citing Dovzhenko, Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini,
Vigo, Parajanov and Bergman.They visit a villa famed for its
ornate floor commissioned by a Russian princess, but are
denied access.

Back on the terrace, Guerra asks Tarkovsky what advice

he would give young directors. Tarkovsky replies that they
should not separate their work from their lives and should be
morally responsible. Visiting another church, Tarkovsky
complains that all they are seeing are tourist sites, which the
hero of the screenplay probably wouldn’t visit.Tarkovsky eats
with some Italians.

Back at the apartment, Tarkovsky speaks of his dislike of

S E A N M A RT I N

1 9 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 198

science fiction, and then about using Bagno Vignoni as a
location. He stresses the importance of their protagonist’s
inner journey.We then see the steam baths at Bagno Vignoni,
followed by a brief interview with an elderly bell ringer.

Returning to the terrace, Tarkovsky speaks about unre-

alised projects and describes two ideas. Over a shot of the
open French windows, Guerra speaks of death and parting,
now that it is time for Tarkovsky to return to Moscow. He
asks Tarkovsky what he will do when he gets home.
Tarkovsky replies that he will go back to the village where he
has a house. Over several long landscape shots, the two men
discuss nature and the countryside. Guerra recites another
poem. Sheep shelter beneath a tree. Tarkovsky contemplates
in a doorway. A close-up of the Madonna of Childbirth.

Once more on the terrace, Guerra asks Tarkovsky if he

likes his house. We see a series of still lifes inside the house,
including the screenplay of Nostalgia. Tarkovsky blows out a
candle. He asks Guerra to read the first poem again.
Tarkovsky stands at the window, looking out. We cut to a
close-up on an old photograph of a Russian village in the
snow. The image fades to white. The end credits roll over a
white screen in silence.

Production History

Tarkovsky was noting in his diary as early as 20 January 1976
about the possibility of making a film in Italy,

218

and by 22

August he had a title, echoing Goethe: Italian Journey. His
collaborator on the project was to be his friend, the screen-
writer Tonino Guerra, and the idea was to convey Tarkovsky’s
impressions of Italy as he travelled around. The first draft of
the script was completed in October, and Tarkovsky spent the
next two years hoping to be allowed to make the film once

1 9 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 199

the nightmare of making Stalker was finally over.

Tarkovsky visited Italy in April 1979, when he and Guerra

had the idea for a film they called ‘The End of the World’,
which would eventually be incorporated into Nostalgia. He
returned in July, and Tempo di Viaggio – ‘A Time of Travel’ –
was shot over the summer, with editing beginning in August,
while they were still filming.To judge from Tarkovsky’s diary,
shooting went well, and it was evidently something of a liber-
ation for him to be working in the West (although his enthu-
siasm for working in the West would wane). Editing
continued into September, when Tarkovsky returned to
Moscow. By now, he planned to return to Italy to make
Nostalgia, as well as finish Tempo. He was allowed to return the
following spring, and Tempo di Viaggio was completed in April
and May 1980, whilst he and Guerra were also working on
the script for Nostalgia, which was completed at the same
time. The first screening of Tempo was held at RAI – which
was one of the backers of Nostalgia – in Rome on 9 June
1980.The film was later broadcast on Italian television.

An Italian Journey

Tempo di Viaggio is Tarkovsky’s only documentary. Originally,
the film was to have shown Tarkovsky soaking up the sights
of Italy and giving his impressions. In calling the film Italian
Journey,Tarkovsky was obviously echoing Goethe and would
have probably wished to appear as an inheritor of the
Romantic tradition (he had a deep interest in the German
Romantics and for many years wanted to make a film about
ETA Hoffmann – see Appendix II). However, as Goethe
revised his Italian diaries before publishing them, so
Tarkovsky’s original idea had changed somewhat by the time
he was finally able to make the film. Shortly before

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 200

Tarkovsky began shooting, he and Guerra had had an idea to
which they gave the working title ‘The End of the World’,
which quickly became subsumed into Nostalgia; Tempo di
Viaggio shows Tarkovsky and Guerra visiting possible loca-
tions for the planned feature.

Although a documentary, Tempo di Viaggio contains many

of Tarkovsky’s signature devices. The film has a measured
pace, and is composed of many long, slow pans. The film’s
opening is a case in point. We see a wooded hilltop; the
camera then pans right slowly, reaching a building that may
be an observatory, before zooming out to reveal that our
point of view is from a roof terrace of a city apartment.This
is followed by a shot of a busy city street, and another slow
zoom out reveals one of the roof terrace’s walls. A doorbell
sounds and we cut back to the previous angle, now showing
Tonino Guerra standing on the terrace. The camera pans
right with him as he enters the apartment, saying that the
caller must be Tarkovsky.We then hold for nearly 30 seconds
on some shutters before they are rolled up, revealing French
windows that lead inside. Another ten seconds elapse before
we hear the muffled voices of Tarkovsky and Guerra, and
then, after another 20 seconds or so, Tarkovsky himself
emerges through the windows and sits down on a
deckchair.

Guerra tells Tarkovsky that they need to decide which

parts of their journey they are going to keep for the script-
in-progress of Nostalgia.This then sets up the film’s storyline.
Tarkovsky admits that his impressions of their journey are
confused, and when discussing Amalfi, we then cut to a shot
of the town, followed by their visit to a steep gorge.The film
then returns to Tarkovsky and Guerra on the terrace, contin-
uing their discussion. In this way, Tempo di Viaggio relates
Tarkovsky’s journeys around (mainly) Southern Italy.

2 0 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 201

Guerra’s apartment acts as the film’s centre of gravity, with
his frequent questioning of Tarkovsky being the reason either
for conversations – Tarkovsky’s favourite directors, advice to
young filmmakers – or for flashbacks of their travels.

One such flashback is to the cathedral of Otranto, which

is one of the film’s most interesting sequences. After
discussing whether Gorchakov should be an architect,
Tarkovsky, Guerra and their interpreter enter the cathedral
to look at the celebrated twelfth-century floor mosaic. A
priest is on hand to explain the symbolism of the floor. In a
speech that could well have played a part in influencing
Domenico’s sermon in Rome, he explains the diverse
cultures represented on the mosaic (of the tree of life) and
that ‘in all cultures there is something true… to enrich
themselves… human beings take whatever they need from
other cultures… today we can have a dialogue with all
cultures.Without any obstacles.Without any ideology.’

219

Nostalgia is further foreshadowed in a number of other

scenes. Tarkovsky feels a location is ‘too beautiful’ for the
film, a sentiment that would resurface in Nostalgia as
Gorchakov’s comment that he is ‘tired of seeing these sick-
eningly beautiful sites’.

At another location, Tarkovsky

complains that Guerra is only showing him tourist sites and,
in the nearest the film gets to some humour, admits ‘I am a
bit worried as I feel like I am on holiday.’

The theme of Russians in exile occurs during the episode

where Tarkovsky and Guerra attempt to view a trompe l’œil
floor in a villa, while back at the apartment Tarkovsky tells
Guerra of his attraction for Bagno Vignoni, where much of
Nostalgia would eventually be shot. We see shots of steam
rising from the spa pool and what is possibly Tarkovsky’s own
hotel room there, which served as the inspiration for
Gorchakov’s room in the film. Already Tarkovsky feels that

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 202

Nostalgia will be largely concerned with Gorchakov’s inner
state: ‘I think it is important to pay attention to the journey
that our character makes inside himself. This is the most
important [thing].’

Tempo di Viaggio does, however, contain elements that are

not typically Tarkovskian, and which could possibly be
attributed to Guerra, who was the film’s co-director. There
are several sequences using a hand-held camera – the visit to
Flore, the mosaic scene, the drive into Locorotondo – which
are the first in a Tarkovsky film since Ivan’s Childhood. The
film’s soundtrack is also particularly spare; in addition, there
are several moments where the film is completely silent, such
as during the trip to the gorge at Flore, or just before the
priest explains the mosaic in Otranto cathedral. Bagno
Vignoni is the only location from Tempo to find its way into
Nostalgia, and the shots of the pool in both films highlight
the differences in the use of sound: in the feature, the pool is
always bubbling, and we also hear the voices of the bathers
and Domenico, but in the documentary, the shots of the pool
are completely unadorned.

Despite its occasional stylistic variations, Tempo di Viaggio

is thoroughly Tarkovskian in most other respects. There are
some striking still lifes, such as the bird and the cage, the
birdcage and the book, the typewriter on the chair on the
roof terrace, and some distinctive landscape shots, especially
towards the end of the film (Bagno Vignoni, the trees in the
meadow). The narrative, too, is typical of Tarkovsky, with its
frequent flashbacks and uncertain timescale. It is not possible
to gauge how long Tarkovsky and Guerra spent on their
travels, but the framing device, that of the two men’s conver-
sations in the apartment and on the terrace, is revealed to
have taken place in a single day when Tarkovsky asks Guerra
to read his poem about the house again, which Guerra had

2 0 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 203

read to Tarkovsky at the beginning of the film. Guerra
wonders which poem Tarkovsky is referring to, and then he
remembers ‘Ah! The one I told you this morning.’ The
frequent conversations between Tarkovsky and Guerra
reflect Tarkovsky’s belief that ‘an artist is only justified in his
work when it is crucial to his way of life’,

220

which is also

the advice he gives to young directors when questioned by
Guerra.As such, Tempo di Viaggio is not so much a film about
the early stages of making Nostalgia, but a film about art as
daily life, and anticipates films such as Victor Erice’s The
Quince Tree Sun.

TA G E

Hamlet (1977)

Cast:

Anatoly Solonitsyn (Hamlet), Margarita Terekhova

(Gertrude), Inna Churikova (Ophelia), Nikolai Karachentsev
(Laertes),Vsevolod Larionov (Polonius)

Production History

Tarkovsky first saw Hamlet – the most popular of
Shakespeare’s plays in Russia – while he was at VGIK. He
seems to have begun thinking about mounting a production
of his own in March 1975, when he wanted to stage it at the
Alexander Theatre in Moscow. This did not prove to be
possible and, by June, he was hoping for the Lenin
Komsomol Theatre instead, which is where the play was
eventually staged. He noted that he was planning to start
rehearsals in November 1975,

221

and a first read-through

was held in January 1976.

The production was beset with difficulties with the cast:

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 204

Oleg Yankovsky quit early on when it became apparent
Solonitsyn was going to play the Dane, while Inna
Churikova (Ophelia) angered Tarkovsky by taking unan-
nounced holidays during rehearsals. Tarkovsky was also not
happy with any of the existing translations of the play,
finding Lozinsky’s ‘inarticulate and clumsy’ and Pasternak’s
‘appalling, opaque’.

222

In the end, he settled for a prose

version, finding that it captured Shakespeare’s meaning
better.

Rehearsals finally began in November 1976, by which

time Tarkovsky was also in pre-production on Stalker. A dress
rehearsal in front of an audience was held on 24 December
1976, with the general consensus being that the acting was
bad.The management of the theatre even wanted Tarkovsky
to replace Solonitsyn and Terekhova, but he refused. Things
seem to have improved by the time of the official first night
on 18 February 1977, with Tarkovsky noting that ‘Tolya
[Solonitsyn] has started to act’ and that ‘the play might
work’.

223

The ‘Unsolved’ Play

Unfortunately, no record of the play seems to exist, apart
from two scenes that were filmed for television on 24
February 1977, after which Tarkovsky, Solonitsyn and
Terekhova were also interviewed. As such, it is difficult to
gauge how much of a success the production was.Tarkovsky
makes few references to it in Sculpting in Time, only noting
that when Polonius is murdered, he clutches the red turban
he had been wearing to his chest, to signify blood.

224

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Tarkovsky’s adapta-
tion was the ending, where the dead Hamlet comes back to
life and one by one resurrects all of the dead characters.

2 0 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 205

Tarkovsky notes in his diary that, by early 1978, Hamlet ‘has
been laid to rest’.

225

He later quotes some positive audience

feedback – ‘your version of Hamlet is the most modern
production I have ever seen on stage… Could that produc-
tion be put on again?’

226

– but in general, the play seems not

to have been a total success. Tarkovsky wrote that ‘Hamlet is
the one play in world literature that has not been solved’,

227

and the fact that he continued to entertain ideas about
making a film version of the play right up until the end of
his life suggests Tarkovsky felt he still had unfinished business
with it.

Boris Godunov (1983)

Cast:

Paul Hudson (Nikitich), John Gibbs (Mitukha),

Jonathan Summers (Andrei Shchelkalov), Philip Langridge
(Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky), Robert Lloyd (Boris
Godunov), Gwynne Howell (Pimen), Michel Svetlev
(Grigory Otrepiev – The Pretender Dmitri), Elizabeth
Bainbridge (The Hostess of the Inn), Francis Egerton
(Missail), Aage Haugland/Anton Diakov (23 & 25 Nov)
(Varlaam), Donald Adams (Frontier Guard), Joan Rogers
(Xenia), Fiona Kimm (Fyodor), Marta Szirmay (Xenia’s
Nurse) Anthony Smith (The Boyar in attendance), Eva
Randova (Marina Mniszek), John Shirley-Quirk (Ragoni),
Patrick Power (The Simpleton), John Kerr (Khrushchov),
John Gibbs (Czernikowski),William Mackie (Lavicki)
Director:

Andrei Tarkovsky

Conductor:

Claudio Abbado

Libretto:

Modest Mussorgsky, based on Pushkin’s play and

Karamzin’s History of the Russian State
Music:

Modest Mussorgsky

Designs:

Nikolai Dvigubsky

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 206

Lighting:

Robert Bryan

Choreography:

Romayne Grigorova

Company:

The Royal Opera

Performance dates:

31 October, 4, 7, 10, 15, 19, 23, 25

November 1983 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,
London

DVD Version

Cast:

Yevgeny Fedotov (Nikitich), Grigory Karasyov

(Mitukha), Mikhail Kit (Andrei Shchelkalov) Yevgeny
Boitsov (Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky), Robert Lloyd
(Boris Godunov), Alexander Morosov (Pimen), Alexei
Steblianko (Grigory Otrepiev – The Pretender Dmitri),
Ludmila Filatova (The Hostess of the Inn), Igor Yan (Missail)
Vladimir Ognovenko (Varlaam), Olga Kondina (Xenia),
Larissa Dyatkova (Fyodor), Eugenia Perlassova (Xenia’s
Nurse), Olga Borodina (Marina Mniszek), Sergei Leiferkus
(Rangoni),Vladimir Solodovnikov (The Simpleton)
Directors:

Stephen Lawless (Stage), Humphrey Burton

(Television)
Conductor:

Valery Gergiev

Company:

Kirov Opera

Performance Date:

April 1990 Mariinsky Theatre, St

Petersburg
Revivals:

Vienna 1991;Tokyo 1994; London 2003

Production History

Tarkovsky’s involvement with a production of Mussorgsky’s
opera goes back to 1981, when the producer Daniel Toscan
du Plantier approached Tarkovsky with a view to directing

2 0 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 207

it. The ‘suggestion threw them all into a trance,’ Tarkovsky
noted in his diary. ‘“But why not Bondarchuk?” was their
reaction; the answer to which was: “Because the director has
to be a religious man and a poet.”’

228

When Claudio Abbado

was asked to stage the opera at the Royal Opera House in
London in 1983, he was given the choice of director.
Tarkovsky was his only choice.

Tarkovsky was delighted to be able to begin work on Boris

at last, and preparations began in October 1983, a few
months after the furore surrounding Nostalgia at Cannes. He
was still in the West, still trying to attain assurances that, if he
were to return home, he would be guaranteed work. He was
also trying to get the Soviet authorities to allow his son,
Andrei Jr, to join him. He made no headway with either
appeal. ‘I am lost!’ he wrote in his diary on 25 May 1983, ‘I
cannot live in Russia, nor can I live here.’

229

This sense of

ambivalence about the West, begun in Nostalgia, continues in
Boris Godunov. The opera also makes reference to nearly all
of his films, and could almost be said to form, along with
Nostalgia and The Sacrifice, a kind of ‘Trilogy of the West’,
reflecting Tarkovsky’s own personal predicament as much as
his ongoing artistic concerns.

Conscience and Exile

Tarkovsky saw Boris Godunov as being about conscience (an
echo of Solaris?), with Boris himself being a man tormented
by ‘a terrifying premonition that his own son will have to
pay for his sins’.

230

(Boris had ordered the death of the

Tsarevich Dmitri in order to secure his own accession.) In
Mirror, Tarkovsky himself was the son, aware that he was
repeating his father’s mistakes. In Boris, his sympathies are
rather more with the father – Boris – and, whereas the film

S E A N M A RT I N

2 0 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 208

looked back to the past, the opera looks both ways, to the
past and to the ever-uncertain future. (It could almost be said
that Tarkovsky was wishing for his son a better life than the
one he himself had had.)

With its subject matter being concerned with Russian

history, it cannot help but recall Andrei Rublev, although here
the tone is darker. As the last scene fades out, a bloody axe
remains illuminated in a spotlight, a reminder, if one were
needed, that Russia’s history is very much far from over, and
anticipates the chaos and bloodshed of Mafia-dominated
post-Soviet Russia. Russian history also forms the cantus
firmus of Mirror, and Pushkin’s letter to Chaadeyev, quoted in
that film by Ignat to the ghostly woman in black, is here
dramatised in the Polish act.The enemy is not the Mongols,
this time, but the West, as personified by the sinister Jesuit
Rangoni, who schemes to get Marina to convert Russia to
Roman Catholicism once she becomes Tsarina. We must
recall that not only is the opera based on Pushkin’s play, but
that his letter to Chaadeyev sparked the Slavophile-
Westerner controversy, which dominated nineteenth-
century Russian intellectual life. (For proselytising Roman
Christianity, Chaadeyev was thrown into a mental asylum.)
The opera’s Poland is, for Tarkovsky, the same as Italy was for
Gorchakov and Sosnovsky in Nostalgia, and the garden of
statues that Sosnovsky dreams about here appears in the
grounds of the castle of Sandomir.

Boris Godunov employs a range of traditional Tarkovskian

motifs: a huge bell, icons, candles, mist and dreams. It is here
that the opera is at its most filmic: as the monk Grigory
confides in the staretz Pimen that he has had ‘that dream’
again, we see the dream – the murder of the Tsarevich
Dmitri – being enacted at the back of the stage, bathed in a
spectral green spotlight, which is here the equivalent of the

2 0 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 209

filmic device of cutting from colour to monochrome. The
boy reappears during Boris’s delirium when he is sitting on
the great map of Russia, again bathed in the green light, and
finally at Boris’s death.This penultimate scene in the opera is
perhaps its most powerful. As with the axe at the very end,
the scene has an air of unwitting prophecy about it: as Boris
lies dying, the ghost of the young Tsarevich reappears and,
seeing that Boris is about to expire, turns to face the huge
pendulum that swings under the arch at the back of the stage
until it finally comes to a standstill as Boris dies. The boy is
normally lit this time, as if to suggest that the past and present
are now in some kind of harmony that defies logic but recalls
the ‘impossible’ endings of Ivan, Solaris, Mirror and Nostalgia.
The fact that the dead Tsarevich is, in his nightshirt, very
reminiscent of Ivan, gives the scene deeper meaning, almost
as if Tarkovsky were coming to terms and peace with his
own work. One cannot help but see the stopping of the
pendulum as Tarkovsky’s unconscious acknowledgement that
his own time had nearly run its course.

A D I O

Turnabout (1965)

Tarkovsky’s only radio drama, Turnabout, is based on William
Faulkner’s 1932 short story about First World War fighter
pilots. (It was filmed in 1933 as Today We Live, directed by
Howard Hawks.) The play, which Tarkovsky directed and
adapted, was recorded when he was working for the all-
Soviet radio station during 1964 and 1965. However,
Turnabout’s anti-war tone did not sit well with the Party,
resulting in the play being pulled from the broadcast sched-
ules at the last minute. It was not broadcast until 26

S E A N M A RT I N

2 1 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 210

September 1987, when Gorbachev’s glasnost was in full
swing. In 1990, it was broadcast in Germany, and later in the
UK and Sweden.

In addition to Turnabout, there exists an original script for

a radio play called The White Crow, apparently a science
fiction story, but which seems to have never been recorded,
let alone broadcast.

O O K S

Sculpting in Time (1984)

Tarkovsky’s book of film theory and autobiographical remi-
niscences was a long time in the making. The first mention
of the book in his diary is on 7 September 1970, when it
bore the title Juxtapositions. His then collaborator, Lenya
Kozlov, was later replaced by Olga Surkova, who suggested
that the book should take the form of a dialogue between
filmmaker and critic, and also came up with Sculpting in Time
as a title. The book continued to gestate throughout the
1970s. By 1980,Tarkovsky was convinced that it would never
get published at home, and so began to think about getting
it published abroad.This eventually happened, with the book
being first published in German in 1984 and in English in
1986. A revised version, including a chapter on The Sacrifice,
appeared in 1989.

Unfortunately, there are small textual discrepancies

between all three of these editions and a definitive text has
yet to appear. This is all the more regrettable, as Sculpting in
Time has become something of a cult book since its first
appearance, ranking alongside Bresson’s Notes on Cinemat-
ography as being one of the best books ever written by a
director about filmmaking.

2 1 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 211

The Diaries (1989)

As with Sculpting in Time, the diaries were also first published
in German, in 1989. An English edition appeared as Time
Within Time two years later.Whereas the differences between
the various editions of Sculpting were generally small, the
differences between the various editions of the diaries are
quite large, with whole sections being omitted from certain
translations. The English edition is perhaps the worst of
them, with very few entries for the last few years of
Tarkovsky’s life. A complete edition was not published until
2001, when the Italian edition appeared.

Andrei Rublev (1991)

The screenplay of Rublev published in 1991 is apparently
Tarkovsky’s original kino roman, and it differs from the
version of the script as published in Iskusstvo Kino in 1964 in
the ordering of its episodes (the balloon flight, for instance,
was at the beginning of Part II in the 1964 version).
Nevertheless, it gives a good impression of how Tarkovsky
originally intended the film to be and includes all of the
episodes that were cut from the shooting script, such as ‘The
Hunt’ and ‘Indian Summer’.

Collected Screenplays (1999)

Intended as a follow-up to the Andrei Rublev script, this
collects most of Tarkovsky’s remaining screenplays together.
Like the published Rublev, most of the scripts are written as
kino romans and read well. All feature details that were subse-
quently changed or omitted in the finished films, and as such
this collection forms a useful companion to the films.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 1 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 212

Unfortunately, it does not include the scripts for the

student films (assuming they still exist), the early Antarctica,
Distant Land, Tempo di Viaggio (a script for which was origi-
nally written in 1976), or any of the films that Tarkovsky
reportedly wrote or co-wrote, such as the relatively late
potboiler Lookout, Snake! (directed by Zakir Sabitov in
1979).

Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids (2002)

The only example of Tarkovsky’s work as a photographer yet
to appear, Instant Light is a collection of Polaroids taken by
Tarkovsky in Russia during 1980 and 1981, and in Italy
between 1979 and 1984. Rather than being rehearsals for
film compositions, the photographs often employ angles that
Tarkovsky would never have used in a film (such as the
photograph of the tree outside his dacha at Myasnoye from
September 1981)

231

and work independently of the films.

They frequently employ the same restricted palette, and
could perhaps be thought of as being both instances of
‘imprinted time’ and examples of Tarkovsky’s dictum that
‘my function is to make [the viewer] aware of his need to
give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him’.

232

O T

U R R E N T LY

VA I L A B L E

I N

N G L I S H

Lectures on Film Directing (1989)

Edited by one of Tarkovsky’s cinematic ‘heirs’, the director
Konstantin Lopushansky, this is divided into five chapters:
‘Film as Art’, ‘The Film Image’, ‘The Script’, ‘The Concept
and its Realisation’ and ‘Editing’. In this book, Tarkovsky is

2 1 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 213

apparently ‘more specific and somewhat less theoretical and
philosophical than Sculpting in Time’.

233

Récits de jeunesse (2004)

Youth Stories is a collection of Tarkovsky’s prose and poetry
dating from his VGIK years up to 1962. Some of the pieces
are inspired by Tarkovsky’s time in Siberia. Currently only
available in French, from Éditions Philippe Rey.

A I N T I N G S A N D

O E M S

Writing about their collaboration on Boris Godunov, Claudio
Abbado describes Tarkovsky as ‘just as I had imagined him
from his films – an artist of immeasurable range, a visionary
director, a painter and a poet’.

234

In 1991, Abbado was

instrumental in reviving Boris at Vienna, which formed the
centrepiece – along with the films – of a Tarkovsky festival
that included two exhibitions of Tarkovsky’s paintings. This
is, to date, one of the few occasions when Tarkovsky’s paint-
ings have been publicly exhibited.A number of his drawings,
however, appear in the diaries, and they reveal Tarkovsky to
have been a gifted draftsman, with a fine, well-judged line.

Tarkovsky’s poetry has likewise been somewhat neglected,

with only a handful of rough verses being included in the
English edition of the diaries. The French Youth Stories
contains poems written in Tarkovsky’s twenties, but they
have yet to be translated into English.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 1 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 214

Endnotes

1. Natasha Synessios, Mirror, IB Tauris, 2001, p.4.
2. Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovsky:The Winding Quest, p.1.
3. Synessios, p.118.
4. This is possibly due to the fact that North American

prints of Tarkovsky’s films were frequently cut by
distributors.An uncut version of Solaris, for instance, was
not released in the USA until 1990. In Europe, the films
were usually distributed uncut, although there were one
or two exceptions, the most notorious of which being
the Italian Solaris, which was cut so heavily and even re-
edited by its distributor, Dino de Laurentiis, that
Tarkovsky sued him.

5. Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, Penguin Books,

1988, p.73.

6. Marina Tarkovskaya interview, Vida T Johnson and

Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual
Fugue, p.18.

7. Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, British

Film Institute, 1987, p.16.

8. Natalia Baranskaya, About Andrei Tarkovsky (Editor:

Marina Tarkovskaya), Progress Publishers, 1990, p.25.

9. Johnson & Petrie, p.19.

10. Tarkovsky’s sister Marina believes there to be no truth to

this legend. Johnson & Petrie, p.20.

2 1 5

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 215

11. Maya Turovskaya,Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Faber and

Faber, 1989, p.17.

12. Alexander Gordon, About Andrei Tarkovsky, pp.39–40.
13. Johnson & Petrie, p.21.
14. The complete article, originally published in the Italian

newspaper L’Unita in 1963, is reproduced on nostal-
ghia.com.

15. Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, Penguin, 1988, p.??.
16. Wajda quote cited in Johnson & Petrie, p.15.
17. Andrei Tarkovsky, Time Within Time: The Diaries

1970–1986, Seagull Books, 1991, diary entry for 10
April 1979, p.180.

18. The film did, however, win the FIPRESCI Prize, the

Ecumenical Jury Prize, Best Director and shared with
Bresson’s L’Argent the Grand Prix de Création.

19. Kies´lowski on Kies´lowski, Danusia Stok (Editor), Faber

and Faber, 1993, p.195.

20. Diary entry for 3 July 1975, Time Within Time, p.111.
21. Sculpting in Time, University of Texas Press, 1989, p.132.
22. Sculpting in Time, p.126.
23. Johnson & Petrie, p.51.
24. Their first script together was the unproduced Antarctica,

Distant Land of 1959.

25. Johnson & Petrie, p.52.
26. Misharin’s participation in the editing of Mirror is

perhaps ascribable to the fact that he and Tarkovsky were
friends, and he was also on good terms with Tarkovsky’s
mother.

27. Arkady Strugatsky, About Andrei Tarkovsky, p.260.
28. Diary, 25 March 1985. The English translation includes

it in the entry for 9 March 1985, Time Within Time,
p.343.Tarkovsky here is actually quoting Tolstoy.

29. Johnson & Petrie, p.48.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 1 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 216

30. Giuseppe Lanci, press conference 19 January 1987.

Reproduced on nostalghia.com.

31. The whole of this fascinating scene appears on Disc Two

of the Criterion DVD edition of the film.

32. Sculpting in Time, p.158.
33. Owe Svensson, Sound in Tarkovski’s Sacrifice, article on

Filmsound.org.

34. Johnson & Petrie, p.96.
35. Sculpting in Time, p.212.
36. Johnson & Petrie, p.38.
37. Sculpting in Time, p.200.
38. Sculpting in Time, p.200.
39. Sculpting in Time, p.223.
40. Sculpting in Time, p.108.
41. Sculpting in Time, p.50.
42. ‘The Apocalypse’, Temenos, Issue 8, 1987, pp.14–15.
43. From an interview with Charles de Brantes in La France

Catholique, 20 June 1986. Reproduced on nostalghia.
com.

44. Sculpting in Time, p.212.
45. In the 1985 Stockholm interview, Tarkovsky is quite

unequivocal: ‘I feel very close to pantheism.’The whole
interview is reproduced on nostalghia.com.

46. De Brantes interview.
47. The pale horse in the latter film only appears in the

close-ups of the Leonardo (it is to the right of the Carob
tree). The dream sequence where Alexander is lying on
a camp bed with Maria wearing Adelaide’s clothes orig-
inally also showed Little Man leading a pale horse past
them. This was cut from the final version of the film,
although it can be seen in the documentary, Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky.

48. Diary entry for 3 January 1974, Time Within Time, p.89.

2 1 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 217

49. Diary entry for 15 September 1976, Time Within Time,

p.131.

50. The filming of this shot can be seen in Donatella

Baglivo’s documentary, Andrei Tarkovsky in Nostalgia,
which clearly shows Patrizia Terreno and the little boy
running around the back of the camera once it has
tracked past them in order to reach their second marks.

51. Sculpting in Time, p.138.
52. Sculpting in Time, p.138.
53. The strange whistlings in Mirror almost suggest that the

film is not merely poetic, but psychic, as if the sound was
the means by which Tarkovsky could communicate with
the past and his ancestors.

54. Surkova was furious that Tarkovsky wanted to be cred-

ited as sole author and took legal proceedings against
him.

55. Sculpting in Time, p.38.
56. Alexander Pushkin,‘The Prophet’, quoted in Sculpting in

Time, pp.221–2. The version quoted here is the Ted
Hughes translation, from Collected Poems, p.1,194, Faber
& Faber, 2003.

57. Nick James, ‘Icon’, Sight and Sound, March 2005, p.30
58. Sculpting in Time, p.29.
59. Sculpting in Time, p.20.
60. Sculpting in Time, p.20.
61. The tune was often broadcast by Voice of America and

came to be seen as a symbol of freedom.

62. Shukshin (1929–74) went on to have a successful career

as both actor, writer and director. He died of a heart
attack after completing what is perhaps his best-known
film, The Red Snowball Tree (1973).

63. Gordon, About Andrei Tarkovsky, p.44.
64. Gordon, About Andrei Tarkovsky, p.44.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 1 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 218

65. The film was shot in the Russian city of Kursk.
66. Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, pp.17–18.
67. Maya Turovskaya,Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, p.19.
68. Marina Tarkovskaya, interview with Gonzalo Blasco,

Zaragoza, Spain, 10 November 2003. Originally
published in Spanish on andreitarkovski.org, an English
translation appears on nostalghia.com. Marina and
Alexander Gordon did later adapt the story into a script,
parts of which were actually shot (but not directed by
Gordon) for the 1994 Russian television documentary
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Taiga Summer.

69. The film faced competition from a professional Lenfilm

production which was adapting the same story at the
same time. The Lenfilm version lost out to Tarkovsky’s
and Gordon’s film, which was the one that Soviet tele-
vision broadcast.

70. Alexander Gordon, interview with Gonzalo Blasco,

Zaragoza, Spain, 10 November 2003. Originally
published in Spanish on andreitarkovski.org, an English
translation appears on nostalghia.com.

71. Sculpting in Time, p.136.
72. c.f. diary entry for 24 January 1973:‘… it isn’t a question

of details, but of what is hidden’. Time Within Time, p.65.

73. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami also uses this

technique, although he seems to have arrived at it inde-
pendently of Tarkovsky.

74. It may simply be a quality of the Facets DVD edition of

the film – from which this dialogue quotation comes –
but the music teacher almost seems to be in black and
white in an otherwise colour scene.

75. Johnson & Petrie, p.68.
76. Evgeny Zharikov, Interview, Ivan’s Childhood, Artificial

Eye DVD.

2 1 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 219

77. Sculpting in Time, p.27.
78. Tarkovsky used back-projection on only five occasions:

in this dream; in the scene in the car after Galtsev and
Kholin pick Ivan up after he runs away; during Berton’s
drive into the city in Solaris; and twice in The Steamroller
and the Violin.

79. Sculpting in Time, p.193.
80. Natasha Synessios, Mirror, p.64.
81. Turovskaya, p.35.
82. Sculpting in Time, p.29.
83. Before this scene was shot, Anatoly Solonitsyn took a

month-long vow of silence in order to make Rublev’s
return to speech more convincing.

84. Scholarship now puts Rublev’s date of birth at 1370, not

1360. He died in 1430.

85. Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, BFI Film Classics, British

Film Institute, 2004, p.23.

86. Bird, p.23. The film was eventually made in 1975 by

Mikhail Shveitser, starring Donatas Banionis, who, by
that time, had worked with Tarkovsky on Solaris.

87. Turovskaya, p.48.
88. Diary entry for 17 June 1973, Time Within Time, p.77.
89. Tarkovsky, quoted in Bird, p.37.
90. Sculpting in Time, p.50.
91. Robert Bird argues that it is Foma’s imagining, pointing

out that the sequence begins with a shot of a piece of
cloth floating in the river and ends with a shot of Foma
washing some brushes in a river which echoes the shot
of the cloth. See Bird, pp.77–9.

92. Tarkovsky’s portrayal of the pagans is sympathetic

enough – their candle-lit rituals are perhaps the most
visually beautiful things in the film – to suggest that he
admired their way of life and beliefs. This feeling is

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 220

borne out by Marfa’s refuting of Rublev’s charge that
their celebrations are bestial, ‘Isn’t all love the same? It’s
just love.’

93. These appear in the 205-minute version only.
94. Bird, p.78.
95. Guy Gauthier, pp.34–7.
96. Tarkovsky defended the cruelty of the original edit by

pointing out that the horse was destined for the abat-
toir the next day anyway and the cow was covered in
asbestos, so it didn’t actually suffer any burns. Given that
Tarkovsky was an animal lover, especially of horses, one
is left wondering why, after having saved the horse from
the abattoir, they couldn’t simply have pretended to kill
it and let the poor beast live out its dotage in pasture.
One also wonders what distress the cow suffered.
Needless to say, Tarkovsky would have been in consid-
erable trouble from animal welfare organisations had
the film been shot today.

97. Michel Ciment, Dossier Positif, Issue 79.
98. Jacques Demeure, Dossier Positif, Issue 81.
99. Andrei Tarkovskii, ‘Iskat’ i dobivat’sia’, Sovetskii ekran 17

(1962), pp.9, 20. Translation by Robert Bird. Cited on
nostalghia.com.

100. E.g. in the diary entry for 11 July 1970, Tarkovsky

mentions both women, writing that Bibi Andersson
had visited him in Moscow and was very keen to be in
the film and that he had also shot tests with Irma
Rausch. Time Within Time, p.5.

101. Diary entries for 12 July, 10 & 11 August 1971, Time

Within Time, p.39.

102. Diary entry for 6 September 1971, Time Within Time,

p.42.

103. Turovskaya, p.57.

2 2 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 221

104. Johnson & Petrie, p.29.
105. In summarising Bradbury’s masterpiece, The Martian

Chronicles, John Clute and Peter Nicholls draw atten-
tion to the book’s qualities, which are positively
Tarkovskian:‘The mood is of loneliness and nostalgia…
throughout the book appearances and reality slip,
dreamlike, from the one to the other… [it has an] anti-
technological bias, the celebration of simplicity and
innocence as imagined in small-town life, the sense of
loss as youth changes to adulthood.’ The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction, Orbit, 1993, p.151.

106. The character is called Rheya in the novel (and in the

Soderbergh version).

107. Lem, Solaris, p.147.
108. Diary entry for 24 May 1981, Time Within Time, p.280.

Tarkovsky quotes widely in the diaries: the Church
Fathers, the Bible, Zen and Taoist masters, plus his
beloved Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, among others,
frequently recur.

109. Lem, p.76.
110. At the end of the Crucifixion scene, where Foma is

washing brushes in the river, the camera pans down to
dwell on the fronds undulating below the surface of the
water.

111. Le Fanu, p.64. This quote is reminiscent of Bresson’s

dictums: ‘Be sure of having used to the full all that is
communicated by immobility and silence’ and ‘Build
your film on white, on silence and on stillness.’ Bresson,
Notes on the Cinematographer, pp.20, 126.

112. Mysterious layouts of dachas and flats would continue

in all of Tarkovsky’s remaining films.

113. All translations of dialogue are taken from the Criterion

DVD edition of the film.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 222

114. Apparently Tarkovsky’s second wife Larissa occasionally

suffered fits, which may well have inspired the
‘Resurrection’ scene. Stalker’s wife and Adelaide in The
Sacrifice also suffer similar fits.

115. Montaigne, ‘On Experience’, Essays, III.13.
116. Diary entry for 17 March 1971, Time Within Time, p.37.
117. Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays, Translated and

edited by William Powell and Natasha Synessios, Faber
& Faber, 1999, footnote 4, p.131. See also the diary
entries for 15 June and 15 August 1970, Time Within
Time, pp.5–6.

118. Diary entry for 12 September 1970, Time Within Time,

p.21.

119. Diary entry for 12 September 1970, Time Within Time,

p.19.

120. Diary entry for 12 September 1970, Time Within Time,

p.21.

121. Painted in the early 1660s, the work now hangs in the

Hermitage in St Petersburg.

122. Johnson & Petrie, p.19.
123. Johnson & Petrie, pp.22–3.
124. Most synopses of the film identify the boy as Ignat, but

a close examination of the costume – a tatty coat with
a wide collar – reveals that it is definitely the young
Alexei.

125. Pushkin was responding to the first of Chaadayev’s

Philosophical Letters, published that year, which attacked
Russian institutions such as the Church, autocracy and
serfdom. He urged Russia to embrace Roman
Catholicism, and was declared insane.

126. Andrei Tarkovsky, Uroki rezhissury [Lectures on Film

Directing], Moscow 1993, p.28, quoted in Synessios,
p.11.

2 2 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 223

127. Synessios, p.11.
128. Diary entry for 7 September 1970, Time Within Time,

p.13.

129. Diary entry for 12 July 1971, Time Within Time, p.39.
130. Diary entry for 11 August 1971, Time Within Time, p.40.
131. Synessios, p.21. Yermash’s ‘thaw’, which also saw Elem

Klimov’s Agony greenlit, was sadly short-lived.

132. Diary entry for 23 March 1973, Time Within Time, p.74.
133. Synessios, p.27.
134. Film title quotes from diary entry for 4 February 1973,

Time Within Time, p.69.

135. Diary entry for 17 March 1974, Time Within Time, p.93.
136. Synessios, p.38. ‘Mysticism’ was a charge levelled at

Tarkovsky throughout his career.

137. Letter sent to the Central Committee of the

Communist Party, quoted in Synessios, p.116.

138. Diary entry for 31 December 1978, Time Within Time,

p.161.

139. Sculpting in Time, p.10. Tarkovsky quotes the ‘baffled’

letters on the preceding pages.

140. Sculpting in Time, p.29.
141. Diary entry for 24 January 1973, Time Within Time,

p.65.

142. I have not been able to locate the source of this quote.

If any reader knows, please get in touch via Pocket
Essentials, and I will rectify this in further editions.

143. Arseny Tarkovsky, ‘First Meetings’, translated by Kitty

Hunter-Blair, Sculpting, p.101. The translations of the
poems in Sculpting in Time are far superior to the mildly
excruciating subtitles on the Artificial Eye DVD of the
film.

144. The Kitty Hunter-Blair translation can be found on

p.123 of Sculpting.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 224

145. The Kitty Hunter-Blair translation can be found on

p.143 of Sculpting.

146. The Kitty Hunter-Blair translation can be found on

p.157 of Sculpting.

147. This doesn’t appear to be the dacha. It more resembles

Alexei’s flat in the present day scenes, suggesting he has
perhaps inherited it from his parents.

148. Synessios, p.48.
149. The sequence also anticipates the desolate, post-indus-

trial landscapes of Stalker.

150. An idea that is given further weight by the fact that

Damansky Island was not ceded to China until 1991.
The other islands that were also a focus of the 1969
dispute were ceded to China in 2004.The transfer was
finalised as this book was being written, in June 2005.

151. The photograph, taken in 1962 by Marina’s husband,

Alexander Gordon, is reproduced in Synessios, p.78.

152. A selection of Lev Gornung’s photographs can be

found Synessios, Mirror.

153. Synessios, p.76.
154. Diary entry for 20 August 1971, Time Within Time, p.41.
155. Diary entry for 13 June 1970, Time Within Time, p.5.
156. Diary entry for 1 September 1970, Time Within Time,

p.7.

157. Johnson & Petrie, p.115.
158. One scene deleted from the script has Alexei dreaming

that he is swimming around the submerged remains of
Zavrazhie. Elem Klimov’s masterly Farewell (1981) deals
with the impact of a hydroelectric project on a small
Siberian community.

159. A contemporaneous trailer for Mirror, included as an

Easter Egg on the Artificial Eye DVDs of both Andrei
Rublev and Solaris, contains material that did not appear

2 2 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 225

in the final film, including a shot from this scene that
clearly shows Tarkovsky’s face. Likewise, a still showing
Tarkovsky holding the bird that he releases into the air
appears on p.128 of Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
(London:Thames & Hudson, 2004)

160. Sculpting in Time, p.134.
161. Sculpting in Time, p.134.
162. Diary entry for 26 January 1973, Time Within Time,

p.66.

163. Two-part films were generally the longer ones and were

subject to different bureaucratic rules than ‘one-part
films’. Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Stalker – Tarkovsky’s
three longest films – were all two-part films. Despite
having an intertitle saying ‘Part II’ around the halfway
point, two-part films were always shown without an
intermission.

164. Diary entry for 26 August 1977. Time Within Time,

p.147.

165. Cited in Johnson & Petrie, p.138.
166. Turovskaya, p.111.
167. Le Fanu, p.103.
168. Incidentally, the day after Rainer Werner Fassbinder

died.

169. The ‘Lancelot Grail’, quoted in Malcolm Godwin, The

Holy Grail, Bloomsbury, 1994, p.10.

170. Dialogue taken from the Artificial Eye DVD of the film.
171. Sacked for, respectively,‘being drunk’ and ‘behaving like

a bastard.’ Diary entry for 15 April 1978. Time Within
Time, p.154.

172. Le Fanu, p.105.
173. ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star

from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon
the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 226

waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood:
and the third part of the waters became wormwood;
and many men died of the waters, because they were
made bitter.’ Revelation 8:10–11.

174. ‘In Stalker Tarkovsky Foretold Chernobyl’, Vladimir

Sharun interviewed by Stas Tyrkin, 2001. Interview
reproduced on nostalghia.com.

175. Another prophetic instance in the film occurs in the

dream. Shortly after we have seen the Ghent Altarpiece,
we see a page torn from a diary. The date is 28
December which, in 1986, was Tarkovsky’s last full day
alive. (He died at 02:00 on the 29th.)

176. Sculpting in Time, p.128.
177. Synessios, p.110.
178. The subtitle of Maya Turovskaya’s chapter on Stalker in

Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, pp.105–16.The ‘confession’
is, of course, Mirror.

179. Gordon, About Andrei Tarkovsky, p.42.
180. ‘In Stalker Tarkovsky Foretold Chernobyl’ Vladimir

Sharun interviewed by Stas Tyrkin, 2001. Interview
reproduced on nostalghia.com.

181. Diary entry for 10 April 1979, Time Within Time, p.180.
182. Diary entry for 11 April 1978, Time Within Time, p.152.
183. Diary entry for 17 July 1979, Time Within Time, p.188.
184. Diary entry for 18 July 1979, Time Within Time, p.189.
185. Berezovsky’s life story as recounted by Gorchakov to

Eugenia is the traditional one, in which the composer’s
nostalgia for Russia drives him to return home, where
he ultimately takes to drink and hangs himself. Recent
research on Berezovsky suggests, however, that he
enjoyed some success upon his return home and died of
a fever.

186. Diary entry for 19 July 1979, Time Within Time, p.189.

2 2 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 227

187. Diary entry for 23 July 1979, Time Within Time, p.191.
188. Diary entry for 11 September 1979, Time Within Time,

p.206.

189. Sculpting in Time, p.202.
190. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, Quartet

Books 1986, p.20. It is not known whether Tarkovsky
ever knew of Bresson’s book, which was first published
in French in 1975.

191. Diary entry for 7 July 1980, Time Within Time, p.261.
192. For instance, in the scene in The Hunters (1977), where

the characters are reminiscing about the elections of
1957, the actors freeze and the election officials walk
into the room and the past is played out in front of the
contemporary characters. In 1980,Tarkovsky co-edited
a TV documentary on Angelopoulos directed by one of
Nostalgia’s assistant directors, Norman Mozzato.

193. Their ages suggest they may be Gorchakov’s step-

daughter and mother-in-law, reflecting Tarkovsky’s own
domestic arrangements in Russia.

194. Tarkovsky discusses saba in Sculpting in Time, p.59.
195. Green, p.108.
196. Sculpting in Time, p.203.
197. Sculpting in Time, p.203.
198. Sculpting in Time, p.203.
199. Diary entry for 15 September 1976, Time Within Time,

p.131.

200. Sculpting in Time, p.216.
201. The script actually identifies her as Adelaide’s daughter

by her first marriage, but this is not made apparent in
the film. Collected Screenplays, p.526.

202. It’s impossible to tell who the man is in the film, as his

face is turned away, but the implication is that it is
Alexander. The published screenplay confirms that

S E A N M A RT I N

2 2 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 228

Alexander sees himself in the dream, although the
dream sequence, as originally written, was quite
different from the one Tarkovsky later shot. Collected
Screenplays, p.544.

203. Actually Adelaide, not Maria. It is taken from a scene in

which Adelaide comforts Alexander after a nightmare.
In the published script, this comes after the ‘snow’
dream, Collected Screenplays, p.545. The scene was cut
from the film, although part of it can be seen in the
documentary, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

204. The original version of this scene was much longer and

also included Otto cycling through the house – a
possible homage to Bunuel – and mourners gathered at
Alexander’s bedside. (He is dreaming of his own death.)
The scene is included in the documentary, Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky.

205. In fact it does, at least in English, Welsh, Slavonic and

Icelandic, all of which are derived from the Indo-
European root wid, ‘to know, to be wise’.

206. The dialogue is from the Swedish Film Institute DVD

of the film. All other quotations in this paragraph are
from Sculpting in Time, p.218.

207. The wise man is GI Gurdjieff. Tarkovsky notes the

saying in his diary on 9 April 1981, Time Within Time,
p.275.

208. The city scenes were shot on the exact spot where the

Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated six
months later.

209. The colour in these scenes was achieved by marrying

colour and black and white prints and then bleeding as
much colour out of the final print as possible; most of
this part of the film is therefore literally colour and
black and white at the same time.

2 2 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 229

210. The car looks similar to Victor’s BMW, but Victor’s car

is a saloon, while the abandoned car appears to be a
hatchback.

211. Le Fanu, p.127.
212. In his introduction to the Channel 4 broadcast of the

film in February 1989 – its first screening on UK tele-
vision – Robinson remarked that Tarkovsky ‘was in
better spirits than I’d ever known him’.

213. Ebbo Demont in About Andrei Tarkovsky, p.357.
214. Tarkovsky’s interpreter on the film, Layla Alexander-

Garrett, also remembers him talking on the phone to
Dakus, his dog.

215. One scene that was shot but did not make it into the

final cut was Alexander’s dream of his own death. It had
its origins in a diary entry for 27 June 1974 (Time
Within Time, p.95), where Tarkovsky talks about how
light and joyous he felt to have departed his earthly
body. In the scene, we see mourners paying their
respects as Alexander lies dead on the couch.The scene
is included in Michal Leszczylowski’s documentary,
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. See note 204.

216. Diary entry for 31 December 1978, Time Within Time,

p.161.

217. Diary entry for 26 September 1975, Time Within Time,

p.116.

218. Time Within Time, p.126.The entry is erroneously dated

13 November 1976.

219. The translation comes from the Artificial Eye DVD of

the film released in 2003, which is notorious for its
poor subtitling. In other scenes, ‘science fiction’ is
rendered as ‘fiction’, Antonioni’s L’Avventura as ‘adven-
tures’ and Stalker as ‘Stalkin’.

220. Sculpting in Time, p.189.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 3 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 230

221. Diary entry for 26 September 1975, Time Within Time,

p.116.

222. Diary entry for 27 January 1976, Time Within Time,

p.121.

223. Diary entry for 24 February 1977, Time Within Time,

p.143.

224. Sculpting in Time, p.154.
225. Diary entry for 7 April 1978, Time Within Time, p.151.
226. Quoted in a diary entry for 12 December 1979. The

comment comes from a talk Tarkovsky gave in Kazan.
Time Within Time, p.216.

227. On ‘Hamlet’, Time Within Time, p.383.
228. Diary entry for 23 June 1981, Time Within Time, p.282.
229. Time Within Time, p.328.
230. Irina Brown, DVD notes.
231. P.29 of the Thames & Hudson edition.
232. Sculpting in Time, p.200.Tarkovsky is speaking about his

films, Stalker in particular, but the sentiment could just
as easily apply to his Polaroids.

233. Johnson & Petrie, p.300, n.7.
234. Claudio Abbado, booklet notes in Hommage à Andrei

Tarkovsky CD, p.1.

235. At the time of writing (2005), Marina has just finished

writing a second memoir.

236. The CD omits two pieces that feature in Stalker, albeit

briefly: excerpts from Ravel’s Bolero and Wagner’s
Meistersinger.

2 3 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 231

Appendix I: Complete Filmography

I L M S

I R E C T E D B Y

A R K OV S K Y

As Director

The Steamroller and the Violin (1960)
Ivan’s Childhood (1962)
Andrei Rublev (1966/69)
Solaris (1972)
Mirror (1974)
Stalker (1979)
Nostalgia (1983)
The Sacrifice (1986)

As Co-Director

The Killers (1956) Co-directed with Alexander Gordon and
Marika Beiku
There Will Be No Leave Today (1959) Co-directed with
Alexander Gordon
Tempo di Viaggio (1980) Co-directed with Tonino Guerra

2 3 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 232

I L M S

O T

I R E C T E D B Y

A R K OV S K Y

As Writer

The First Teacher (1965) Director: Andrei Mikhalkov-
Konchalovsky (uncredited, with Andrei Mikhalkov-
Konchalovsky and Chingiz Aitmatov)
Sergei Lazo (1968) Director: Alexander Gordon (uncredited)
Tashkent the Bread City (aka Tashkent, City of Plenty) (1968)
Director: Shukhrat Abbasov (uncredited, with Andrei
Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky)
One Chance in a Thousand (1969) Director: Leonid
Kosharjan, Bagrat Oganisian
The End of the Chieftain (aka The End of Ataman) (1971)
Director: Shaken Aimanov
The Ferocious One (1973) Director:Tolomush Okeev
Lookout, Snake! (1979) Director: Zakir Sabitov

The French edition of the diaries also lists a short TV film
called Le Rêve [The Dream] that Tarkovsky apparently wrote
for Araïk Agaranian, but gives no date.

As Artistic Adviser

One Chance in a Thousand (1969) Director: Leonid Kosharjan
Sour Grapes (1973) Director: Bagrat Oganisian

As Artistic Director

Fortune-Telling by a Daisy (1978)

2 3 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 233

As Editor

Sergei Lazo (1968) Director: Alexander Gordon (uncredited)
Theo Angelopoulos (1980) Director: Norman Mozzato (co-
editor)

As Actor

The Killers (1956) Director: Tarkovsky, Gordon and Beiku;
Whistling Customer
I am Twenty (1964) Director: Marlen Khutsiyev; Party Guest
Sergei Lazo (1968) Director: Alexander Gordon; Soldier
(uncredited)
Mirror (1974) Director: Tarkovsky; Alexei on his
deathbed/sick bed (uncredited)
The Road to Bresson (1984) Director: Leo De Boer & Jurriën
Rood; Himself

Films About Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky in Nostalgia (1984) Director: Donatella
Baglivo (Italy), 90 mins
A Poet in the Cinema (1984) Director: Donatella Baglivo
(Italy), 60 mins
Film is a Mosaic of Time (1984) Director: Donatella Baglivo
(Italy), 65 mins
Andrei Tarkovsky (1987) Producer: Charlie Pattinson, BBC
Television, 53 mins
Behind the Scenes on The Sacrifice (1987) Channel 4 Television
Moscow Elegy (1987) Director: Alexander Sokurov (Russia),
88 mins
The Exile and Death of Andrei Tarkovsky (1987) Director: Ebbo
Demont (West Germany), 131 mins

S E A N M A RT I N

2 3 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 234

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988) Director: Michal
Leszczylowski (Sweden), 101 mins
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Taiga Summer (1994) (Russia)
Tarkovsky: A Journey to His Beginning (1996) Director:
Tomoko Baba (Japan), 45 mins
The Recall (1996) Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Jr (Russia), 25
mins
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000) Director: Chris
Marker (France), 55 mins
Student Andrei Tarkovsky (2003) Director: Galina Leontieva
(Russia), 29 mins
After Tarkovsky (2003) Director: Peter Shepotinnik (Russia),
59 mins

In addition, there exist some VGIK student shorts about the
making of Andrei Rublev and several hours of footage were
shot on the set of Stalker, but apparently never edited.A 1978
Finnish documentary, The Responsibility of the Artist
(Director: Risto Mäenpää), contains footage from the first
shoot of Stalker and interviews with Tarkovsky during the
same period.

2 3 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 235

Appendix II:

Unrealised Scripts and Projects

N F I L M E D

C R I P T S

Extract (1958) (AKA Konsentrat/The Concentrate)

Not actually a script, but a short story written as part of
Tarkovsky’s VGIK entrance examination, inspired by his time
in Siberia, concerning the head of a geological expedition
who waits on a foggy jetty for some samples to be delivered
to him. Marina Tarkovskaya and Alexander Gordon later
adapted the story into a script, parts of which were actually
shot (but not directed by Gordon) for the 1994 Russian tele-
vision documentary, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Taiga Summer.

Antarctica, Distant Land (1959/63)

(with Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Oleg Osetinsky)

Originally entitled The Smile, or Antarctica, Land of Miracles,
this was apparently Tarkovsky’s first attempt at a feature-
length script. It was about a group of Russian scientists on an
expedition in the Antarctic. Director Grigory Kozintsev read
it, but turned it down. The script was revised in 1963 for
Edmond Keosayan, but he turned it down also.The original

2 3 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 236

version was published in the magazine Moskovsky
Komsomolets in January/February 1960.

Ariel (aka Light Wind aka The Renunciation)

(1971)

(with Friedrich Gorenstein)

Loosely based on the science fiction novel by Alexander
Beliaev, Ariel is set in 1900 and concerns a young monk,
Filipp, who is given the power to fly as the result of a scien-
tific experiment. The local postman tries to set him up as a
messiah figure, but it does not work out and Filipp returns
to the monastery.The ending sees him as a military chaplain
at Verdun, where he dies.

Hoffmaniana (1975/84)

Various real and imagined episodes in the life of the German
writer ETA Hoffmann: a ghostly encounter at the opera;
Hoffmann’s unrequited love for a young music student; a
drunken wedding celebration; magic mirrors; a sinister
sojourn in a castle; Hoffmann meeting his double at a
banquet; and his final deathbed delirium. Dreams, memories
and visions intermingle in what is perhaps the best of
Tarkovsky’s unfilmed scripts. Originally published in
Iskusstvo Kino in 1976, he revised it slightly in 1984, and
resumed work on the project in 1986, intending it to be his
next film after The Sacrifice.

2 3 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 237

Sardor (1978)

(with Alexander Misharin)

A ‘Tadjik Western’ – the Soviet equivalent of Spaghetti
Westerns which were usually shot in the Soviet Asian
republics – Sardor is set in Kazakhstan in 1915.The family of
the hero, Mirza, have contracted leprosy and been evacuated
to the island of Borsa–Kelmes in the Aral Sea. Mirza decides
to buy the island to safeguard the remainder of his family’s
lives, and spends many years panning for gold in the desert.
An old rival, Sha-Mukhamed, tries to steal the gold, but is
ultimately killed. Mirza is oblivious to the outside world, not
even noticing the Russian Revolution. In a climactic battle
on the island, all of the main characters perish. Mirza expires
trying to collect water for his leprous family.

N R E A L I S E D

RO J E C T S

These are projects that never got as far as the script stage;
only proposals and outlines exist.Tarkovsky’s two most cher-
ished projects that he never lived to realise were film versions
of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (to be told twice over, from two
different viewpoints), which recurs throughout his diaries
from the very first entry in April 1970 until the early 80s, and
a virtually silent adaptation of Hamlet. His last diary entry
(15 December 1986) mentions Hamlet, lamenting the fact
that he is too weak to work on it.

The diaries also mention numerous other projects, perhaps

the most noteworthy of which being adaptations of Thomas
Mann (principally Joseph and His Brothers, The Magic Mountain
and Doctor Faustus) and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,
all of which recur throughout entries for the 1970s.

S E A N M A RT I N

2 3 8

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 238

On several occasions,Tarkovsky compiled lists of possible

projects in his diaries, which are reproduced below.

List of 7 September 1970

Kagol (Bormann’s trial)
Physicist Dictator
The House with a Tower (based on the story by Friedrich
Gorenstein)
Echo Calls
Deserters
Joseph and his Brothers (Thomas Mann)
Matryona’s House (Solzhenitsyn)
A film about Dostoyevsky
A White,White Day (eventually filmed in 1973–4 as Mirror)
A Raw Youth (Dostoyevsky)
Joan of Arc, 1970 (presumably a modern-day version of Joan’s
story. Tarkovsky was familiar with Bresson’s version and
Dreyer’s also.)
The Plague (Camus)
Two Saw the Fox

List of 29 July 1974

(films for Television)

Oblomov (Goncharov)
The Life of Klim Samgin (Gorky)
Seminary Sketches (Nikolai Pomyalovsky)

2 3 9

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 239

List of 14 April 1978

(films that Tarkovsky wanted to make in the West)

The Horde
Doctor Faustus
Hamlet (both screen and stage adaptations)
Crime and Punishment
The Renunciation (Ariel)
‘Latter day’ Joan of Arc
Two Saw the Fox
Joseph and His Brothers
Hoffmaniana
Italian Journey (which was to become Tempo di Viaggio)

List of 3 December 1979

Nostalgia (which was finally shot in 1982)
The Idiot
The Escape (a projected original screenplay about Tolstoy’s
last years)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Master and Margarita (based on Bulgakov’s novel)
The Double (not simply Dostoyevsky’s story, but a film about
his life)

The French edition of the diaries (Journal 1970–1986,
Cahiers du cinéma 1993) mentions several additional proj-
ects that it lists as scripts. These are: La Derniere chasse [The
Last Hunt]; La catastrophe [The Catastrophe]; and an adapta-
tion of the Estonian writer Jaan Kross’s 1978 novel, Le Fou
du Tzar [The Tsar’s Madman]. Several other titles are listed as
projected films (as opposed to scripts). They are L’apocalypse

S E A N M A RT I N

2 4 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 240

ou Saint Jean à Patmos; Le Golgotha; Le loup des steppes (Hesse’s
Steppenwolf); Le pauvre Jean ou Le Grand Inquisiteur and La via
après vie (‘un film-documentaire’).

Tarkovsky also entertained ideas about making a film about
Carlos Castaneda; a version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; The Country,
a quasi-documentary about Tarkovsky’s dacha, which was to
have featured Alexander Kaidanovsky as Tarkovsky; a short
film about Rudolph Steiner (to be made with Alexander
Kluge) (1984–6); and a Life of St Anthony (1984–6).

At various times, Tarkovsky planned stage versions of Julius
Caesar, Macbeth and Ostrovsky’s Last Love. He was also due to
start work on a production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman
at Covent Garden in January 1986, but which was postponed
due to Tarkovsky’s ill health.

2 4 1

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 241

Suggestions for Further Reading

O O K S B Y

A R K OV S K Y

In English

Sculpting in Time, University of Texas Press, 1989
Andrei Rublev, Faber & Faber, 1991
Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986, Faber & Faber,
1994
Collected Screenplays, Faber & Faber, 1999
Instant Light:Tarkovsky Polaroids,Thames & Hudson, 2004

Not in English

Uroki rezhissury [Lectures on Film Directing], Lenfilm, 1989
(Russian)
Diari: Martirologio, Edizioni della Meridiana, 2002 (The
complete edition of the diaries, Italian)
Récits de Jeunesse [Youth Stories], Éditions Philippe Rey, 2004
(French)

2 4 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 242

O O K S

B O U T

A R K OV S K Y

In English

Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, BFI Film Classics, British Film
Institute, 2004
Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovsky:The Winding Quest, Macmillan,
1993
Vida T Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei
Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue Indiana University Press, 1994
Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, British Film
Institute, 1987
Natasha Synessios, Mirror, Kino Files Film Companion #6,
IB Tauris, 2001
Marina Tarkovskaya (Editor), About Andrei Tarkovsky, Progress
Publishers, 1990
Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, Faber & Faber,
1989

Not Currently in English

Tatyana Elmanovits,The Mirror of Time: The Films of Andrei
Tarkovsky, 1980 (Estonian)
Seweryn Kusmierczyk, The Tolstoy Complex, 1989 (Polish)
Olga Surkova, A Book of Comparisons: Tarkovsky–79, 1991
(Russian)

Tarkovsky and I: A Girl Scout’s Diary, 2002 (Russian)
With Tarkovsky and About Tarkovsky, 2005 (Russian)

Larissa Tarkovskaya (as Larissa Tarkovski), Andrei Tarkovski,
Calmann-Lévy, 1998 (French)
Marina Tarkovskaya, Pieces of the Mirror, 1999 (Russian)

235

About Andrei Tarkovsky (expanded, two-volume edition),

2 4 3

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 243

2002 (Russian)
Maya Turovskaya, 7

⁄

, or the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, 1991

(Russian)

In addition, there are several hard-to-find but well-produced
books in Japanese, edited by Hironobu Baba. The Book of
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (Libro Port, 1994) is lavishly illus-
trated and includes Tarkovsky’s workbooks for the film, his
diary and the shooting script. The Book of Tarkovsky’s The
Killers (Seidosha Publishers, 1997) is a companion book to
the 1996 documentary, Tarkovsky: A Journey to His Beginning.
It includes early writings and drawings by Tarkovsky and
contributions from Marina Tarkovskaya, Alexander Gordon,
Yuli Fait, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Mikhail
Romadin. Finally, there is a book solely of photographs – the
editor’s name is not given – simply called Andrei Tarkovsky,
published in 1989.

E L AT E D

N T E R E S T

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, Quartet
Books, 1996
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997
Rainer and Rose-Marie Hagen, Bruegel: The Complete
Paintings,Taschen, 2000
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, Penguin Books, 1981
Vittorio Sgarbi, Carpaccio, Abbeville Press, 1995
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, Gollancz, 1978
Arseny Tarkovsky, Life, Life: Selected Poems, Crescent Moon
Publishing, 2000
Frank Zöllner & Johannes Nathan, Leonardo da Vinci: The
Complete Paintings and Drawings, Taschen, 2003

S E A N M A RT I N

2 4 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 244

The Swedish book of Russian icon paintings that Alexander
receives as a gift in The Sacrifice is Michail Vladimirovic
Alpatov’s Ryskt Ikonmåleri [Russian Icon Painting], published in
1984 by Gidlunds Förlag.

E S O U R C E S

The Andrei Tarkovsky Institute – based in Moscow, Florence
and Paris – exists to preserve Tarkovsky’s papers and memory.
Its founding members were Larissa Tarkovskaya, Krzysztof
Zanussi, Mstislav Rostropovitch and Robert Bresson. There
appears to be a significant amount of unpublished material
in their archives, which, it is hoped, will see the light of day
at some stage. The institute can be contacted at 6, Rond-
Point des Champs Elysées 75008 Paris. E-mail: tarkovski@
wanadoo.fr.

DV D R

E C O M M E N DAT I O N S

The Killers, Criterion
There Will be No Leave Today, Currently unavailable on DVD
The Steamroller and the Violin, Facets
Ivan’s Childhood, MK2
Andrei Rublev, Criterion (205-minute version); at the time of
writing, there is no acceptable version of the 185-minute cut
currently available on DVD in the West. In Russia, the best
DVD version is that distributed by Lizard, which features
Mosfilm’s 2004 restoration of the film
Solaris, Criterion
Mirror, Artificial Eye
Stalker, Artificial Eye
Tempo di Viaggio; at the time of writing, there is no accept-
able version currently available on DVD

2 4 5

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 245

Nostalgia; at the time of writing, there is no acceptable
version currently available on DVD
Boris Godunov, Phillips
The Sacrifice, Swedish Film Institute

O M PA C T

I S C S

Claudio Abbado, Hommage à Andrei Tarkovsky, Deutsche
Grammophon 437-8402;
Abbado conducts musical tributes by Luigi Nono, György
Kurtág, Beat Furrer and Wolfgang Rihm, recorded live at the
1991 Tarkovsky Festival in Vienna.

Eduard Artemyev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Electroshock
Records ELCD 012
Artemyev’s music from Tarkovsky’s 1970s films.
Unfortunately, some tracks have been re-recorded for this
album (originally released on vinyl in 1990), but it does
contain as compensation Artemyev’s own tribute, Dedication
to A Tarkovsky.

Cinema Classics: Andrei Tarkovsky, London POCL-4336
Japanese CD that contains most

236

of the classical music used

in the films:
Solaris: JS Bach,‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesus Christ’ BWV 639,

from Orgelbüchlein

Mirror: JS Bach,‘Das alte Jahr vergangen ist’ BWV 614, from

Orgelbüchlein

Pergolesi, ‘Quando corpus morietur’ from Stabat Mater
JS Bach, St John Passion BWV 245, No. 33, ‘Und siehe da,

der Vorhang im Tempel zeriß’

Purcell, ‘They tell us that your mighty powers’ from The

Indian Queen

S E A N M A RT I N

2 4 6

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 246

JS Bach, St John Passion BWV 245, No.1,‘Herr, unser Herscher’
Stalker/Nostalgia: Beethoven, Symphony No.9, Choral,

Fourth Movement

Nostalgia: Verdi, ‘Requiem aeternam’ from Requiem
The Sacrifice: JS Bach, St Matthew Passion BWV 244, No.47,

‘Ebarme dich’

The works of Maxim Berezovsky, whom Gorchakov
researches in Nostalgia, are available on the CDs Sacred
Ukrainian Music Vol.1 (available from www.claudiorecords.
com) and Maxim Berezovsky – Secular Music (available from
www.marecordings.com).

E B S I T E S

www.nostalghia.com is the pre-eminent Tarkovsky site on
the web in English. Curated by Trond Trondsen and Jan
Bielawski, the site contains a wealth of information, some of
it unavailable in English elsewhere. The site also contains
many articles and essays on Tarkovsky, a form in which some
of the most stimulating Tarkovksy criticism is currently being
published.

Other Tarkovsky sites include:

www.nostalghia.cz (Czech)
www.tarkovszkij.hu (Hungarian)
www.andreitarkovski.org (Spanish)
http://homepage.mac.com/satokk/news.html (Japanese)
www.nostalgiya.com (Korean)

2 4 7

A N D R E I TA R K O V S K Y

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 247

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 248

Abbado, Claudio

(Conductor), 206, 208,
214, 231, 246

Antonioni, Michelangelo

(Director), 18, 198, 230

Apocalypse,The, 36, 38, 41,

42, 63, 67

Art, 36, 46, 47, 59, 88, 98,

111, 115, 126, 128, 133,
148, 204

Artemyev, Eduard

(Composer), 30, 33, 97,
99, 120, 145, 155, 246

artists, 12, 15, 18, 37, 48, 58,

59, 86, 88, 98, 117, 127,
128, 133, 158, 160, 204,
208, 214

autobiography, 12, 60, 73–5,

98, 117–19, 139–44,
160–62, 177–8, 193–6

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 16,

33, 99, 120, 121, 124,
131, 179, 185

Bergman, Ingmar (Director),

13, 18, 19, 85, 193, 198,
215, 216

Bogomolov,Vladimir

(Writer), 29, 52, 61, 64,
65, 66, 105

Bondarchuk, Natalya

(Actor), 99, 106

Bondarchuk, Sergei

(Director), 106, 169, 208

Bradbury, Ray (Writer), 107,

109, 221

Bresson, Robert (Director

and Film Theorist), 18,
169, 171, 198, 211, 216,
222, 227, 239, 244, 245

Breughel the Elder, Pieter,

36, 89, 104, 116

Burlyaev, Nikolai (Actor),

30, 61, 64, 77

camera movements, 45, 47,

170

Cannes Film Festival, 20, 21,

2 4 9

Index

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 249

24, 77, 84, 85, 98, 100,
107, 128, 146, 152, 164,
169, 180, 185, 186, 208

Carpaccio,Vittore, 36, 37,

90, 244

Chernobyl disaster, 159,

226, 227

colour coding, 46, 49, 82,

89, 97, 106, 130, 147,
149, 156, 166, 172, 174,
182, 184, 188, 210

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 38, 47,

59, 87, 122, 135, 150,
222, 238, 239, 240

dreams, 39, 42, 44, 46, 48,

49, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 87,
119, 125, 128, 129, 130,
133, 134, 139, 140, 160,
165, 172, 174, 188, 190,
192, 209

Dreyer, Carl Theodor

(Director), 154, 239

ecology, 38, 67, 116, 157, 176
Eisenstein, Sergei (Director

and Film Theorist), 13, 49

Erice,Victor (Director), 13,

204

faith, 13, 35, 36, 39, 88, 147,

149, 153, 155, 157, 160,
170, 172

family, 11, 44, 110, 117, 132
Fanu, Mark Le (Critic), 54,

109, 154, 158, 193, 215,
219, 222, 226, 229, 243

Feiginova, Ludmila (Editor),

29, 30, 31, 32, 76, 99, 120,
128, 145

Fellini, Federico (Director),

18, 198

fire, 96, 106, 122, 123, 131,

134, 140, 167

flight, 41, 68, 69, 94, 136,

212

Gordon, Alexander (Director

and AT’s brother-in-law),
18, 50, 53, 55, 161, 216,
218, 219, 225, 227, 232,
233, 234, 236, 244

Gorenstein, Freidrich

(Writer), 29, 99, 105, 237,
239

Goskino (Soviet cinema

body), 22, 23, 24, 25, 83,
84, 85, 105, 126, 128

Green, Peter (Critic), 12,

176, 243

Grinko, Nikolai (Actor), 30,

61, 76, 99, 121, 145, 159

Guerra,Tonino (Writer), 21,

107, 163, 168, 170, 197,
198, 199, 200, 201, 202,
203, 204, 232

I N D E X

2 5 0

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 250

Hamlet (Paul Scofield stage

production), 18

Hamlet (play), 181
Hamlet (Tarkovsky film

version), 230, 238

Hamlet (Tarkovsky stage

production), 150, 160,
206

history, 11, 117, 132, 135,

136, 209

Holy Fools, 34, 38, 39, 77,

83, 92, 93, 96, 97

icons, 82, 88, 93, 181, 209
Ignatievo (place), 142, 178
Iosseliani, Otar (Director),

13, 18, 24

Ivan’s Childhood, 9, 13, 19,

21, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36,
37, 38, 39, 41, 52, 55, 58,
61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73,
74, 82, 84, 86, 91, 98, 105,
203, 219, 232, 245

Josephson, Erland (Actor),

30, 163, 170, 179, 180,
187

Kaidanovsky, Alexander

(Actor), 145, 154, 159,
169, 241

Kalatozov, Mikhail

(Director), 24, 58

Khrushchev, Nikita, 13, 24, 65
Kies´lowski, Krzysztof

(Director), 13, 26, 177,
216

Knyazhinsky, Alexander

(Cameraman), 31, 145,
151, 159

Kubrick, Stanley (Director),

107, 109

Kurosawa, Akira (Director),

18, 89

Lem, Stanislaw (Writer), 20,

29, 52, 99, 105, 108, 109,
244

Leonardo, 36, 123, 124, 137,

138, 140, 180, 182, 192,
217, 244

levitation, 39, 139, 191
long takes, 31, 45, 69, 91,

152, 157, 177

Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky,

Andrei (Director), 13, 24,
28, 55, 58, 61, 76, 82, 86,
233, 236, 244

Mirror, 12, 15, 20, 23, 28, 31,

32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43,
45, 47, 49, 58, 67, 69, 117,
118, 119, 120, 125, 128,
129, 130, 131, 133, 134,
137, 139, 142, 144, 150,
160, 161, 169, 172, 175,

2 5 1

I N D E X

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 251

178, 191, 194, 209, 210,
215, 216, 218, 225, 227,
232

mirroring, 41, 110, 138, 165,

185

mirrors, 37, 58, 60, 102, 122,

138, 165, 175

Montaigne, Michel de, 108,

115, 223

Mosfilm, 23, 24, 31, 55, 61,

64, 65, 76, 83, 99, 105,
106, 120, 125, 126, 127,
128, 145, 150, 159, 245

nature, 17, 29, 39, 40, 41, 62,

72, 75, 92, 108, 109, 110,
111, 115, 137, 176, 181,
187, 192, 199

newsreel, 64, 73, 74, 122,

123, 124, 130, 132, 135,
136, 137, 138, 143, 172

Nostalgia, 9, 20, 25, 31, 32,

37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43,
44, 45, 46, 47, 58, 59, 67,
69, 163, 167, 169, 170,
171, 172, 175, 178, 185,
186, 187, 188, 195, 199,
200, 201, 202, 203, 204,
208, 209, 210, 218, 228,
232, 234, 240, 246, 247

nostalgia (as theme), 12, 178
Nykvist, Sven (Cameraman),

31, 179, 180, 186, 192

Ovchinnikov,Vyacheslav

(Composer), 30, 32, 33,
56, 58, 61, 76

paganism, 40, 79, 88, 90, 92,

151, 194

pantheism, 40, 92
Parajanov, Sergei (Director,

close friend of AT), 13,
18, 22, 24, 25, 198

poet, 122
poetry, 11, 14, 16, 26, 31, 36,

48, 122, 130, 132, 143,
164, 165, 168, 178, 193,
208, 214, 218

Pushkin, Alexander, 47, 48,

121, 123, 124, 137, 139,
143, 206, 209, 218, 223

Rausch, Irma (AT’s first

wife, actor and director),
18, 30, 105, 117, 118,
119, 141, 221

religion, 11, 36, 208
Rerberg, George

(Cameraman), 20, 31,
120, 145, 151

Roadside Picnic (Novel), 145,

150, 152, 244

Romm, Mikhail (Director),

17, 18, 19, 50, 52, 53

Rublev, Andrei, 13, 19, 20,

22, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 38,

I N D E X

2 5 2

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 252

39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 70,
73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82,
84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91,
92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 105,
114, 117, 122, 125, 136,
142, 172, 209, 212, 215,
220

Rublev, Andrei (Icon

painter), 82, 85, 98

sacrifice (as theme), 39, 44,

83, 183, 189

Sacrifice,The, 9, 12, 20, 21,

27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37,
38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45,
46, 47, 66, 67, 68, 98,
144, 162, 179, 185, 186,
188, 190, 192, 193, 194,
195, 196, 208, 211, 217,
222, 232, 237, 245, 246,
247

Sartre, Jean Paul, 13, 19, 65
Sculpting in Time, 26, 27, 36,

37, 47, 58, 59, 71, 73, 90,
129, 144, 170, 186, 205,
211, 212, 214, 216, 217,
218, 219, 220, 224, 225,
227, 228, 229, 230, 231,
242

Shakespeare,William, 160,

204, 205

Sight and Sound (Magazine),

13, 48

silence, 35, 38, 72, 81, 92,

96, 97, 155, 171, 198,
199, 222

Solaris, 9, 25, 31, 32, 33, 36,

37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45,
46, 52, 58, 66, 67, 69, 97,
99, 100, 101, 102, 105,
106, 107, 108, 109, 111,
114, 115, 117, 118, 119,
126, 136, 152, 172, 190,
194, 195, 208, 210, 215,
220, 222, 225, 232, 244,
245, 246

Solaris (Novel), 20, 29, 105
Solonitsyn, Anatoly (Actor),

30, 76, 99, 121, 131, 145,
154, 155, 159, 161, 169,
204, 205

sound, use of, 33, 34, 47, 58,

116, 149, 159, 163, 173,
191, 203

space, handling of, 36, 45,

58, 69, 111, 113, 153,
156, 174, 175

Stalker, 9, 20, 24, 29, 30, 31,

32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41,
42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 66, 67,
70, 144, 145, 146, 147,
148, 149, 150, 151, 152,
153, 154, 155, 156, 157,
158, 159, 160, 161, 162,
170, 171, 172, 173, 175,
176, 177, 186, 195, 200,

2 5 3

I N D E X

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 253

205, 222, 225, 226, 227,
230, 231, 232, 235, 245,
246, 247

Steamroller and the Violin,The,

20, 28, 32, 55, 57, 73, 98,
220, 232, 245

Strugatsky, Arkady (Writer),

185

Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris

(Writers), 20, 29, 52, 145,
150, 152, 216, 244

Surkova, Olga (Critic), 44,

47, 142, 211, 218, 243

symbolism, 35, 39, 40, 198,

202

Synessios, Natasha (Critic),

11, 12, 74, 215, 220, 223,
224, 225, 227, 243

Tarkovsky Jr, Andrei (AT’s

younger son), 21, 194,
208

Tarkovskaya, Larissa (AT’s

second wife), 30, 99, 117,
120, 145, 159, 163, 194,
196, 243, 245

Tarkovskaya, Maria Ivanovna

(AT’s mother), 14, 15,
60, 119, 138, 140, 141,
143

Tarkovskaya, Marina (AT’s

sister), 14, 55, 118, 138,
140, 215, 243

Tarkovsky, Arseny (Poet,

AT’s father), 14, 15, 16,
60, 73, 121, 122, 131,
140, 164, 166, 178, 224,
244

Tarkovsky, Arseny (Senka,

AT’s eldest son), 18, 118,
141, 142

Tempo di Viaggio, 21, 107,

168, 169, 197, 200, 201,
203, 213, 232, 240, 245

Terekhova, Margarita

(Actor), 36, 121, 127, 135,
204, 205

thaw (political), 13, 24, 126,

224

The Killers, 18, 50, 52, 53,

55, 57, 232, 234, 244,
245

There Will Be No Leave Today,

18, 19, 53, 54, 55, 57

Time Within Time, 212, 216,

217, 218, 219, 220, 221,
222, 223, 224, 225, 226,
227, 228, 229, 230, 231,
242

Tolstoy, Leo, 47, 59, 216,

222, 240, 243

Turnabout, 210, 211
Turovskaya, Maya (Critic),

17, 44, 54, 84, 153, 216,
219, 220, 221, 226, 227,
243, 244

I N D E X

2 5 4

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 254

unrealised projects, 199, 236,

238

Venice Film Festival, 19, 21,

62, 65, 66, 84, 85

VGIK (Film School), 17, 18,

19, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58,
60, 204, 214, 235, 236

Vigo, Jean (Director), 18,

198

Wajda, Andrzej (Director),

20, 158, 216

water, 35, 40, 70, 72, 74,

133, 148, 155, 158, 159,
173, 176, 238

women, role of, 43, 44, 119,

141, 164, 170, 192, 194

Yankovsky, Oleg (Actor), 30,

121, 163, 169, 170, 171,
205

Yermash, Filip (Head of

Goskino), 23, 25, 127,
129, 151, 224

Yurievets (place), 14, 15, 16,

17, 73

Yusov,Vadim (Cameraman),

20, 30, 31, 55, 58, 61, 64,
76, 99, 106, 108

Zavrazhie (place), 14, 142,

225

2 5 5

I N D E X

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 255

All Sean Martin’s titles are available

from Pocket Essentials

The Black Death

1 903047 74 9 £3.99 pb

Alchemy & Alchemists

1 903047 52 8 £3.99 pb

The Knights Templar

1 904048 28 5 £9.99 hb

The Cathars

1 904048 28 5 £9.99 hb

You can browse all our titles at

www.pocketessentials.com

Available from all good bookshops or send a cheque to:

Pocket Essentials (Dept SS), P.O. Box 394, Harpenden,

Herts, AL5 1XJ. Please make cheques payable to

‘Oldcastle Books’, add 50p for paperback postage and

£1 for hardcover postage and packing for each book in

the UK

US customers can send $8.95 plus $1.95 postage and

packing for each book payable to;Trafalgar Square

Publishing, PO Box 257, Howe Hill, North Pomfret,

Vermont 05053, USA email tsquare@sover.net

Customers worldwide can order online at

www.pocketessentials.com

Tarkovsky 14/11/05 10:54 am Page 256

Document Outline

Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Life and Times
Theory and Practice
The Student Films
Works in Other Media
Endnotes
Appendix I: Complete Filmography
Appendix II: Unrealised Scripts and Projects
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index

Wyszukiwarka

Podobne podstrony:
Howard Hughes The American Indian Wars (Pocket Essential) 2001
Paul Charles The Beatles (Pocket Essential series) 2003
From the Notebooks of Andrei Platonov
Ancient Greece Pocket essentials
Next insert your finger in one of the pockets in the square base
Film Studies Pocket Essential series
The Pocket History of Freemasonry by Fred L Pick PM & C Norman Knight MA PM
Pocket Essential Doctor Who (Mark Campbell)
Jankovsky Jason Alan Trading Rules That Work The 28 Essential Lessons Every Trader Must Master
(Ebook Self Help) Life Skills Survival The Ten Essentials Of Survival
The Red Book Michel de Saint Martin
William Shakespeare Pocket Essentials
Nazi War Trials (Pocket Essential series)
Kavod and Shem Paradigms and the Divine Manifestations (Andrei Orlov)
Michael Paine Crusades, pocket essentials (2005)
The Pocketbook Of Economic Indicators
[Mises org]Rothbard,Murray N The Essential von Mises(1)
2014 05 04 THE ESSENTIALS OF A HEALTHY FAMILY part 3

więcej podobnych podstron

The Pocket Essential Andrei Tarkovsky (Sean Martin)

Document Outline